A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Volume V
THE CENTURY PSYCHOLOGY SERIES

Richard M. Elliott, Gardner Lindzey, and

Kenneth MacCorquodale
Editors
A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
.
In
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Volull1e V

Edited by

Edwin G. Boring Gardner Lindzey

HARVARD UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

New York

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Preface

Autobiography improves with age as it ripens into history. When the

first volume of A History of Psychology in Autobiography appeared in 1930
psychologists found it interesting. Its readers for the most part were familiar
with the writings of the men and women who spoke through its pages; often
they knew the biographers personally or had at least listened to them, and
they profited from seeing how the owner of an important name regarded his
own work and what importance he assigned to events that appeared to have
shaped his life. When first written, these stories lay, nevertheless, almost in
the present, for-except in the speculation about how childhood forms a man-
an intellectual autobiography that covers forty years does not consider that it is
speaking of the past until much later. Now, however, thirty years have gone by
since those first three volumes of 1930-1936 were published, and the lives de-
scribed in them are now history-recent history, to be sure, but long enough
ago for psychologists to send their students to sense in these accounts the
attitudes of an earlier generation and the atmosphere in which it thrived, the
spirit of a time when psychology was smaller, less complex and more intimate.
How the value of present effort increases with time becomes evident
when one examines the table at the end of this preface. There you see the
ages of the contributors to this series and the dates of their deaths. Of the
fifty-eight psychologists who contributed to the first four volumes, only five
are still living. Of the forty-three who wrote for the first three volumes only
one is left-Sir Frederic Bartlett. It is necessary to get these personal records
before mortality intervenes, yet not before the lives described are approaching
completion. The present committee has lost Heinz Werner, who died after
accepting our invitation to contribute, but we are fortunate in being able to
include Kurt Goldstein, who completed his biography before he died. Three
other psychologists (Heymans, Hoffding, de Sanctis ) died before the volume
containing their contributions could be published, and three others (Calkins,
Zwaardemaker, Hull) died in the year of publication.
Yet all in all the great men and women of psychology have been a hardy
lot. Of the fifty-four contributors who have passed on at the date of this
v
vi PREFACE

wntmg only one, Woodworth, reached the 90's. The youngest to die was
Klemm at 54, and the next youngest was Franz at 59. The median age of
these autobiographers at death is at present between 77 and 79, in between
Drever and Terman. Two were in their 50's, eleven in their 60's, fifteen in
their 70's, twenty-five in their 80's, and one in his 90's.
At the end of the 1920's, when the new historians of the still new psy-
chology were complaining that insufficient information was available about
the lives, and thus the motivations, of the eponyms whom it was their task
to describe, the present series was begun by Carl Murchison and the Clark
University Press. At the time, the committee asked that the contributors tell
of the motivations that guided them in their professional careers, not fully
realizing in the then unformed state of motivational psychology how little a
man knows correctly of his own motivations. When, after a lapse caused first
by the exhaustion of the pool of sufficiently mature prominent psychologists
and then by the distraction of World War II, the project was revived twenty
years later, the invitation was changed to stress conscious motivation less and
the events of the life more. Here follows an excerpt from the Preface of
Volume IV, published in 1952:

The reader of this volume will see how much our autobiographers differ
from one another in the nature of their efforts. Perhaps they differ most in the
degree with which they find unity in their lives. Presumably everyone of them
would like to see his intellectual history as the evolution of a single purpose, for
integrity is good and simplicity is elegant. No one, of course, fully succeeds in
this undertaking, for the story of every life is constrained by the exigencies of
its owner's environment.
Some of these accounts are more intellectualistic than others, and it may
be that they show the greater unity, either because some irrelevancies are
omitted from the life history or because irrelevancies are actually, at least to a
certain degree, omitted from the actual living. Other accounts are more environ-
mentalistic, because social and institutional events and accidents have figured
so largely in them. The environmentalistic autobiographer may have had a chief
long-term goal, have pursued it, have achieved it with some fair degree of suc-
cess, yet he may feel that the unforeseeable accidents of living have determined
much of his life and have perhaps even altered his goal. The intellectualist, if
such we may call him, may, on the other hand, have suffered disruption of
plans less than his colleague, but it is probable that he has also been less in-
terested in the effect of external forces upon himself.
No one, not even the members of this group of distinguished psychologists,
can hope to deal adequately with the springs of his motivation. What he tells
about himself and what he shows about his values can, however, go far toward
instructing the reader as to how human motive moves to make science progress.
The accidents of living do not always seem irrelevant to progress when they
operate in the manner shown in the pages of this book. Psychology in auto-
biography cannot be complete, but it can make a contribution to the history of
psychology which is unique.
PREFACE vii
Here follows an excerpt from the invitation to contributors to the present
volume. It is an extension and modification of the instruction for 1952.

The important decisions in regard to the contents of your autobiography

are yours. We hope, however, that the document will devote some attention to
the historical details of your life. In connection with the facts of life, we hope
you will identify yourself with regard to such matters as place and date of birth,
significant educational and professional experiences, and family. We are, of
course, particularly interested in the intellectual and professional aspects of your
life as they have influenced and been influenced by events, ideas, and persons
in and out of the field of psychology. Your perception of major developments
and issues within psychology during your lifetime and your relation to these
events will be of special importance. We should appreciate any discussion of
your feelings, motives, and aspirations or of significant events that would in-
crease the reader's understanding of you and your contributions to psychology.
In brief, we are interested in your intellectual life history, but at the same time
we feel that it should be illuminated by as much information about your personal
background and inner motives as you are ready and able to divulge.

Considerable pressure has been put upon the committee to include a

complete bibliography of the contributors. Complete bibliographies for such
men as these would run from 100 to more than 500 citations apiece. Psycholo-
gists look wistfully at Murchison's Psychological Register of 1932 and hope
for its updating, but neither that nor the inclusion of bibliographies here is
practicable. The committee has space for only fifteen biographies of 12,000
words each, and it would have to decrease this number to add the bibliogra-
phies. Also, there would be duplication, for complete bibliographies are often
published elsewhere for distinguished psychologists. The memoirs of acade-
mies sometimes include them. There are, moreover, already available some
fairly complete bibliographies of psychologists whose publications have been
listed in the Psychological Index and in Psychological Abstracts from 1894 to
1958; they are in the Author Index to those two serials published in four
volumes in 1960 by C. K. Hall and Company of Boston.
Why are only Americans included as contributors in the present volume?
The early volumes were divided approximately in the proportion of eight
Americans to seven Europeans. Of course psychology was then and is even
more now predominantly American; the language of this book is English and
its character American. Nevertheless the present committee began with the
expectation that its American character would be assured by our choosing
those foreigners who had made an impression upon American thought in psy-
chology, the Europeans or others who appeared as most important in the
United States even if not in their own countries. We did indeed correspond
with some Europeans and quite early met with two declinations, but the
crucial desideratum that fixed our decision was the great scarcity of psycholo-
gists in Europe and elsewhere who had notably influenced the thinking of
viii PREFACE

American psychologists, who had not already contributed to a previous vol-

ume, and who were over 60 years old. Let the critic who suspects us of
xenophobia try naming a few psychologists, foreign to America, who meet
these three specifications.
On the other hand, this committee, whose authority ceases with the
publication of this volume, looks forward hopefully to a Volume VI that will
again be truly international. With the multiplication of psychologists on six
continents it becomes more difficult to choose the outstanding names than it
was when psychology seemed limited to Western Europe, Great Britain, and
America, but the discrimination should not be impossible.
In the first four volumes sixty-one psychologists were invited to con-
tribute and only three declined (Cattell, Lashley, and Kohler). For the pres-
ent volume eventually we asked twenty-two psychologists. Werner died.
Three would have liked to participate but had too many commitments for
even our deferred deadline. They thought that if they could be asked early
for a Vol ume VI, they could accept. Three others declined for personal
reasons.
The present committee was formed by accretion. The idea of reviving the
series began with Lindzey, who secured the agreement of Appleton-Century-
Crofts to undertake the publication. Boring, who has been on all five of the
committees and had conducted the negotiation with President Jefferson of
Clark University for the transfer of the rights from Clark University to
Appleton-Century-Crofts, agreed to act as chairman if Lindzey would be
Executive Officer. The Committee is grateful to President Jefferson and Clark
University for relinquishing these rights in the interests of this historical and
scientific enterprise. l\1acCorquodale was included because of his long asso-
ciation with Lindzey and Appleton-Century-Crofts in the editing of the
Century Psychology Series. Wapner was a natural continuation of the Clark
ancestry for the series. Werner at Clark had been a member of the previous
committee. Newbrough and Sharp had on their own initiative been conduct-
ing a poll of psychologists to assess the desirability of reviving the series.
Clearly it was best to fuse the two enterprises. The American Psychological
Association was asked to sponsor the undertaking, as it had Volume IV, ap-
pointing a new committee if it deemed wise, but it declined, believing that
the present committee did not need its help. Nevertheless we felt that our
committee could profit from more intelligence, so we added Beach and Hobbs
to our membership. This committee has prepared the present volume, but it
is not self-perpetuating. We believe, however, that Lindzey will be an ade-
quate care-taker for the interests of the series between volumes. Especially
must we mention the indispensable assistance of Miss Leslie Segner in the
final preparation of the manuscript for publication.
We thank the contributors. They will receive no royalties but we hope
they find satisfaction in this bit of immortality that it is possible for us to
give them. They have now gained posterity for an audience, and long years
PREFACE ix
after they are gone they can still be speaking to the strange new psychologists
who will be their intellectual descendants. The small royalties that accrue
from the sales of this volume quite properly go to the American Psychological
Foundation.

Frank A. Beach Kenneth MacCorquodale

University of California University of Minnesota
Edwin G. Boring, Chairman J. R. Newbrough
Harvard University National Institute of Mental
Nicholas Hobbs Health
George Peabody College for Joseph C. Sharp
Teachers lValter Reed Army Institute of
Gardner Lindzey, Executive Officer Research
University of Texas Seymour Wapner
Clark University

January, 1967
Contributors to Volumes I-V
VOLUME I VOLUME
1930
J. M. Baldwin (1861-1934)
M. W. Calkins (1863-1930)
E. Claparede (1873-1940)
R. Dodge (1871-1942)
P. Janet (1859-1947)
]. Jastrow (1863-1944)
F. Kiesow (1858-1940)
W. McDougall (1871-1938)
C. E. Seashore (1866-1949)
C. Spearman (1863-1945)
W. Stern (1871-1938)
C. Stumpf (1848-1936)
H. C. Warren (1867-1934)
T. Ziehen (1862-1950)
H. Zwaardemaker (1857-1930)
VOLUME II
1932
B. Bourdon (1860-1943)
J. Drever (1873-.1950)
K. Dunlap (1875-1949)
G. C. Ferrari (1869-1932)
S. I. Franz (1874-1933)
K. Groos (1861-1946)
G. Heymans (1857-1930)
H. Hoflding (1843-1931)
C. H. Judd (1873-1946)
C. L. Morgan (1852-1936)
W. B. Pillsbury (1872-1960)
L. M. Terman (1877-1956)
M. F. Washburn (1871-1939)
R. S. Woodworth (1869-1962)
R. M. Yerkes (1876-1956)
xi
III
1936
J. R. Angell (1869-1949)
F. C. Bartlett (1886- )
M. Bentley (1870-1955)
H. A. Carr (1873-1954)
S. De Sanctis (1862-1935)
J. Frobes (1866-1947)
O. Klemm (1884-1939)
K. Marhe (1869-1953)
C. S. Myers (1873-1946)
E. W. Scnpture (1864-1945)
E. L. Thorndike (1874-1949)
J. B. Watson (1878-1958)
W. Wirth (1876-1952)
VOLUME IV
1952
\V. V. D. Bingham (1880-1952)
E. G. Boring (1886- )
C. L. Burt ( 1883- )
R. M. Elliott (1887- )
A. Gemelli (1878-1959)
A. Gesell ( 1880-1961)
c. L. Hull (1884-1952)
W. S. Hunter (1889-1954)
D. Katz (1884-1953)
A. Michotte (1881-1965)
J. Piaget (1896- )
H. Pieron (1881-1964)
C. Thomson (1881-1955)
L. L. Thurstone (1887-1955)
E. C. Tolman (1886-1959)
xii CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUMES I-V
VOLUME V K. Goldstein (1878-1965)
J. P. Guilford (1897- )
1966 H. Helson ( 1898- )
W. R. Miles (1885- )
G. Murphy (1895- )
G. W. Allport (1897- ) H. A. Murray ( 1893- )
L. Carmichael (1898- ) S. L. Pressey ( 1888- )
K. M. Dallenbach (1887- ) C. R. Rogers ( 1902- )
J. F. Dashiell (1888- ) B. F. Skinner (1904- )
J. J. Gibson (1904- ) M. S. Viteles ( 1898- )
Contents

Preface v

Contributors to Volumes I-V xi

Gordon W. Allport

Leonard Carmichael 27

Karl :1\1.Dallenbach 57

John F. Dashiell 95

James J. Gibson 125

Kurt Goldstein 145

J. P. Guilford 167

Harry Helson 193

Walter R. Miles 221

Gardner Murphy 253

Henry A. Murray 283

Sidney L. Pressey 311

Carl Rogers 341

B. F. Skinner 385

Morris S. Viteles 415

xiii
Gordon W Allport
Bergson held that every philosophic life pivots on a single "personal
idea," even though the attempt to express this idea never fully succeeds. This
dictum, savoring as it does of idealism and romanticism, is alien to the Lockean
image of man that dominates Anglo-American psychology. And yet I confess
I am attracted to this proposition. It seems to state in a broad way a testable
hypothesis.
One might say that my own personal idea is to discover whether such
broad hypotheses concerning the nature of man arc empirically viable-at
least as viable as the associationistic and reactive hypotheses that today govern
the American psychological outlook. Although I suspect that Bergson ex-
aggerates the potential unity of human personality, I also think that he, as
well as other Leibnitzian, neo-Kantian, and existential writers, sets a chal-
lenge to empirical psychology; and that something should be done to test
these views. The philosophy of man and the psychology of man should be
brought to confront one another.
Let me suggest some relevant empirical questions. How shall a psycho-
logical life history be written? What processes and what structures must a
full-bodied account of personality include? How can one detect unifying
threads in a life, if they exist? The greater part of my own professional work
can be viewed as an attempt to answer such questions through piecemeal and
stepwise research and writing. If my theoretical writings exceed in bulk my
output of research, it is because of my conviction that significant, not trivial,
questions must be posed before we lose ourselves in a frenzy of investigation.
In 1940 I assigned my Harvard seminar the problem "How shall a
psychological life history be written?" The seminar included the following
members: Jerome Bruner, Dorwin Cartwright, Norman Polansky, John R. P.
French, Alfred Baldwin, John Harding, Dwight Fiske, Donald McGranahan,
Henry Riecken, Robert' White, and Freed Bales. I mention their names be-
cause it seems to me that while these scholars have pursued diversified and
distinguished careers, much of their subsequent creative work has been
broadly relevant to the topic of the seminar.
We did not succeed in our self-imposed task. It is true that we designed
a set of rules and composed cases to fit the rules, but at the end we were
3
4 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

distressed by the hollowness of the product. Our abortive rules were never
published, yet from the seminar issued several important published researches,
some of them summarized in my monograph The Use of Personal Docu-
ments in Psychological Science (1942).
I still do not know how a psychological life history should be written.
And here I am, faced ironically enough with the assignment of writing my
own psychological vita. Lacking a method I shall have to bumble along as
best I can, hoping that psychologists of the future will learn how such an
assignment should be carried through.

1897-1915
Every autobiographer finds his own genealogy of captivating interest
and knows that his family relationships are of highest explanatory impor-
tance. But the reader is likely to find the same material dull-something to
be tolerated because it ought to be relevant. The writer has great difficulty
showing the reader just what is relevant, and where and why. He himself
does not know how to separate primary formative influences in his heredity
and early environment from those that are of minor or negligible significance.
My own account will be as brief as possible.
Father was a country doctor who learned his profession after a career
in business and after having a family of three sons. I, the fourth and last of
the family, was born November 11, 1897, in Montezuma, Indiana, where
my father had set up his first medical practice. My mother and I were, I
believe, his first patients. Soon afterward he moved his practice to Streetsboro
and to Hudson in Ohio. Before I started school he moved again to Glenville
(Cleveland), where I had the advantage of twelve years of sound and unin-
terrupted schooling.
Since my brothers were considerably older (Harold, nine years; Floyd,
seven years; Fayette, five years) I fashioned my own circle of activities. It was
a select circle, for I never fitted the general boy assembly. 1 was quick with
words, poor at games. When I was ten a schoolmate said of me, "Aw, that
guy swallowed a dictionary." But even as an "isolate" I contrived to be the
"star" for a small cluster of friends.
Our family for several generations had lived in rural New York State.
My paternal grandfather was a farmer, my maternal grandfather a cabinet-
maker and Civil War veteran. My father, John Edwards Allport (born
1863), was of pure English descent; my mother, Nellie Edith Wise (born
1862), was of German and Scottish descent.
Our home life was marked by plain Protestant piety and hard work.
My mother had been a school teacher and brought to her sons an eager
sense of philosophical questing and the importance of searching for ultimate
religious answers. Since my father lacked adequate hospital facilities for his
GORDON W. ALLPORT 5
patients, our household for several years included both patients and nurses.
Tending office, washing bottles, and dealing with patients were important
aspects of my early training. Along with his general practice my father en-
gaged in many enterprises: founding a cooperative drug company, building
and renting apartments, and hnally developing a new specialty of building
and supervising hospitals. I mention his versatility simply to underscore the
fact that his four sons were trained in the practical urgencies of life as well
as in a broad humanitarian outlook. Dad was no believer in vacations. He
followed rather his own rule of life, which he expressed as follows: "If every
person worked as hard as he could and took only the minimum Iinancial
return required by his family's needs, then there would be just enough
wealth to go around." Thus it was hard work tempered by trust and affec-
tion that marked the home environment.
Except for this generally wholesome foundation, I cannot identify any
formative influence of special importance until after my graduation from
Glenville High School in 1915, at which time I stood second highest in a
class of 100. Apparently I was a good routine student, but definitely unin-
spired and uncurious about anything beyond the usual adolescent concerns.
Graduation suddenly brought up the problem of further schooling.
Wisely my father insisted that I take a summer to learn typing at a business
college-a skill I have endlessly prized. During this period my brother Floyd
who had graduated from Harvard in 1913 suggested that I apply there. It
was late to do so, but I was hnally admitted after squeezing through the
entrance tests given in Cambridge in early September. Then came an ex-
perience of intellectual dawn.

1915-1924

Did ever a Midwestern lad receive a greater impact from "going East to
college"? I doubt it. Almost overnight my world was remade. My basic moral
values, to be sure, had been fashioned at horne. What was new was the
horizon of intellect and culture I was now invited to explore. The under-
graduate years (1915-1919) brought a welter of new influences.
First and most important was the pervading sense of high standards.
Harvard simply assumed, or so it seemed to me, that excellence should pre-
vail. At the first hour examinations I received an array of D's and C's. Pro-
foundly shattered, I stiffened my efforts and ended the year with A's. As a
prize I was awarded a detur (what might that be?) in the form of a de luxe
edition of Marius, the Epicurean (who was he?). In the course of hfty years'
association with Harvard I have never ceased to admire the unspoken ex-
pectation of excellence. One should perform at the highest level of which
one is capable, and one is given full freedom to do so. Although all my courses
were valuable to me, my focus was soon directed toward psychology and
6 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

social ethics. Taken together these two disciplines framed my later career.
Miinsterberg, looking like Wotan, was my first teacher in psychology.
My brother Floyd, a graduate student, was his assistant. From Munsterberg's
guttural lectures and from his textbook Psychology: General and Applied
(1914), I learned little except that "causal" psychology was not the same as
"purposive" psychology. The blank page dividing the two corresponding sec-
tions of the textbook intrigued me. Could they not be reconciled and fused?
I wondered. Harry l\1urray had also started to study with Miinsterberg. In
"What Should Psychologists Do About Psychoanalysis?" (1940), he reports
that he was so revolted by the chill of Munsterberg's approach that he fled
to the nearest exit, thereby retarding by several years the choice of his later
profession. Meat for me was poison for l\1urray. The question arises then:
What is a "good" teacher? I drew nourishment from Munsterberg's dualistic
dilemma as well as from his pioneer work in applied psychology.
Soon I found myself taking courses with Edwin B. Holt, Leonard
Troland. \N alter Dearborn, and Ernest Southard. Experimental psychology
I took with Herbert Langfeld and my brother. Between times and out of
hours I gained much from my brother's more mature reflections on the prob-
lems and methods of psychology. He invited me to serve as a subject in his
own researches on social influence. Munsterberg had persuaded him to follow
the Moede tradition and discover the differences resulting from the perform-
ance of tasks in groups and alone.
World War I dislocated my program only slightly. As an inductee in the
Students' Army Training Corps I was allowed to continue my courses (with
sanitary engineering and map-making added). Even at our training camp
I prepared, with Langfeld's encouragement, reports on psychological aspects
of rifle practice. Although my contribution was sophomoric, the assignment
was beneficial. The Armistice was signed on my twenty-first birthday, No-
vember II, 1918. Demobilization and a return to my chosen program fol-
lowed rapidly. At commencement, 1919, I received my A.B. degree, and
Floyd received his Ph.D.
A final line of undergraduate influence came through my studies in
the Department of Social Ethics, chiefly with James Ford, and especially
from the accompanying field training and volunteer social service which
heavily engaged my interest. All through college I conducted a boys' club
in the West End of Boston. At various times I did volunteer visiting for the
Family Society and served as volunteer probation officer. During one summer
I held a paid job with the Humane Society of Cleveland; during another I
worked for Professor Ford as field agent for the registration of homes for war
workers in crowded industrial cities of the East. At the Phillips Brooks House
I held a paid job as executive of the committee to assist foreign students and
as secretary of the Cosmopolitan Club. All this social service was deeply
satisfying, partly because it gave me a feeling of competence (to offset a
GORDON W. ALLPORT 7

generalized inferiority feeling) and partly because I found I liked to help

people with their problems.
This social service interval reflected my search for personal identity. It
blended also with my attempt to achieve a mature religious position. Like
many undergraduates I was in the process of replacing childhood conceptions
of doctrine with some sort of humanitarian religion. A few years later, how-
ever, I reacted against this essentially Unitarian position because it seemed
to me that to exalt one's own intellect and affirm only a precarious man-made
set of values cheapened the whole quest. Humility and some mysticism, I
felt, were indispensable for me; otherwise I would be victimized by my own
arrogance. Arrogance in psychological theorizing has always antagonized me;
I believe it is better to be tentative, eclectic, and humble.
My two lines of study gradually merged into an important conviction.
If one were to do effective social service, one needed a sound conception
of human personality. Sound theory must underlie application. This convic-
tion was clearly expressed later in my Ph.D. thesis, which was titled "An
Experimental Study of the Traits of Personality: With Special Reference
to the Problem of Social Diagnosis." This, of course, was an early formula-
tion of the riddle: How shall a psychological life history be written?
After graduation I had no clear idea what I should do. Vaguely I felt
that social service administration might be a better line for me than teaching.
But an opportunity came to give teaching a trial. For one year I taught
English and sociology at Robert College in Constantinople during the last
gasp of the Sultan's reign (1919-1920). I greatly enjoyed the year-its free-
dom and novelty and sense of achievement. When by cable I was offered
a fellowship for graduate study at Harvard I knew that teaching was not
such a bad career for me, and I accepted the opportunity. Two life-long
friendships were formed at Robert College-one with the family of Dean
Bradlee Watson, who later became professor of dramatic literature at Dart-
mouth and our son's godfather; the other with Edwin Powers, later Deputy
Commissioner of Correction for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
En route from Constantinople to Cambridge, an event of pungent sig-
nificance occurred, namely, my one and only encounter with Sigmund
Freud. I have told the story many times but it must be repeated, for it had
the character of a traumatic developmental episode. My brother Fayette was
at that time in the United States trade commission in Vienna. It was during
the period of Hoover relief activities. My brother invited me to stop for a
visit.
With a callow forwardness characteristic of age twenty-two, I wrote
to Freud announcing that I was in Vienna and implied that no doubt he
would be glad to make my acquaintance. I received a kind reply in his own
handwriting inviting me to come to his office at a certain time. Soon after
I had entered the famous red burlap room with pictures of dreams on the
8 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wall, he summoned me to his inner office. He did not speak to me but sat in
expectant silence, for me to state my mission. I was not prepared for silence
and had to think fast to find a suitable conversational gambit. I told him of
an episode on the tram car on my way to his office. A small boy about four
years of age had displayed a conspicuous dirt phobia. He kept saying to his
mother, "I don't want to sit there ... don't let that dirty man sit beside
me." To him everything was sch1Jlut::ig. His mother was a well-starched
Hausfrau, so dominant and purposive looking that I thought the cause and
effect apparent.
When I finished my story Freud fixed his kindly therapeutic eyes upon
me and said, "And was that little boy you?" Flabbergasted and feeling a bit
guilty, I contrived to change the subject. While Freud's misunderstanding of
my motivation was amusing, it also started a deep train of thought. I realized
that he was accustomed to neurotic defenses and that my manifest motivation
(a sort of rude curiosity and youthful ambition) escaped him. For thera-
peutic progress he would have to cut through my defenses, but it so hap-
pened that therapeutic progress was not here an issue.
This experience taught me that depth psychology, for all its merits, may
plunge too deep, and that psychologists would do well to give full recogni-
tion to manifest motives before probing the unconscious. Although I never
regarded myself as anti-Freudian, I have been critical of psychoanalytic ex-
cesses. A later paper entitled "The Trend in Motivational Theory" (1953)
is a direct reflection of this episode and has been reprinted, I believe, more
frequently than any other of my articles. Let me add that the better balanced
view of motivation expressed in later neo-Freudian, ego psychology is more
to my taste.
Back at Harvard I found that the requirements for the Ph. D. degree
were not stiff (not nearly stiff enough); and so with only two years' addi-
tional course work, a few examinations, and the thesis, I qualified for this
degree in 1922 at the age of twenty-four. McDougall had joined the staff
and was one of the readers of my thesis, along with Langfeld and James
Ford. During this period Floyd, an instructor, was editing Morton Prince's
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. I helped him with the work,
thus making an early acquaintance with the journal I myself was later to
edit (1937-1948).
During this period I suffered from vocational misgivings. Unlike most
of my student colleagues I had no giftedness in natural science, mathematics,
mechanics (laboratory manipulations), nor in biological or medical spe-
cialties. Most of the psychologists I admired had competence in some adjuvant
field. I confessed my misgivings about my fitness to Professor Langfeld. In his
laconic way he remarked, "But you know there are many branches of psy-
chology." I think this casual remark saved me. In effect he was encouraging
me to find my own way in the humanistic pastures of psychology.
GORDON W. ALLPORT 9

But did I have enough courage and ability to develop my deviant in-
terests? No other psychologist, at least at Harvard, seemed to be interested
in social values as an academic problem nor in developing a lifelike psy-
chology of personality. Indeed the available relevant work included not much
more than a few early studies by June Downey (Wyoming), Walter Fernald
(Concord Reformatory), and R. S. Woodworth (Columbia), who during the
war had devised his "Personal Data Sheet," an early pencil-and-paper per-
sonality test. I believe that my own thesis was perhaps the first American
dissertation written explicitly on the question of component traits of per-
sonality. It led to my maiden publication (with my brother) entitled "Per-
sonality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement" (1921). In this con-
nection I may add that I suspect my own course given at Harvard in 1924
and 1925, titled "Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspects," was
probably the first course on the subject offered in an American college.
Standing at a frontier was a somewhat alarming business. The climax of
my conflict came in connection with my single encounter with Titchener. I
had been invited to attend the select gathering of his group of experimen-
talists, which met at Clark University in May, 1922, just as I was finishing
my thesis. After two days of discussing problems in sensory psychology
Titchener allotted three minutes to each visiting graduate to describe his own
investigations. I reported on traits of personality and was punished by the
rebuke of total silence from the group, punctuated by a glare of disapproval
from Titchener. Later Titchener demanded of Langfeld, "Why did you let
him work on that problem?" Back in Cambridge Langfeld again consoled
me with the laconic remark, "You don't care what Titchener thinks." And I
found that I did not.
The whole experience was a turning point. Never since that time have
I been troubled by rebukes or professional slights directed at my maverick
interests. Later, of course, the field of personality became not only acceptable
but highly fashionable. But, although the field itself became legitimate, my
own theoretical position was not always approved.
I have implied that my graduate years at Harvard were not particularly
productive intellectually. They did, however, lead to two benefits over and
beyond the degree. Within the congenial circle of graduate students I found
my future wife, Ada Lufkin Gould, a Boston girl, who, after taking her
master's degree, worked in the field of clinical psychology. Our interests were
closely parallel. I was also awarded by Harvard a Sheldon Traveling Fellow-
ship, which gave me two years in Europe. For me these years were a second
intellectual dawn. '
The German tradition in psychology was still strong in America, al-
though Germany itself had been flattened by World War I and inflation. It
was only natural for me to head for Germany. William James and E. B.
Titchener had immortalized in their textbooks the Teutonic foundations of
 10 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

our science, and my own teachers had studied there. From Harvard phi-
losophers R. B. Perry and R. F. A. Hoernle, I had gained further respect for
German thought.
I was not prepared, however, for the powerful impact of my German
teachers who included the aged Stumpf and Dessoir, the younger Max
Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Eduard Spranger in Berlin, and in Ham-
burg, William Stern and Heinz Werner. A fellow student was Heinrich
Kluver, who helped me with my halting German, and who has remained a
cherished friend ever since even though our paths of psychological interest
have diverged.
At that time Gestalt was a new concept. I had not heard of it before
leaving Cambridge. It took me some weeks to discover why my teachers
usually started their two-hour lectures with a castigation of David Hume.
Soon I learned he was the natural whipping boy for the German structural
schools of thought. Canzheit and Gestalt, Struktur and Lehenformen, and
die unteilhare Person were new music to my ears. Here was the kind of
psychology I had been longing for but did not know existed.
Of course I realized that romanticism in psychology could poison its
scientific soil. (I myself had been brought up in the Humean tradition.) At
the same time it seemed to me that the high quality of experimental studies
by the Gestalt school, the original empirical investigations at Stern's Institute,
and the brilliance of the Lewinian approach (which I came to know at
second hand) gave safe anchorage to the kinds of concepts that I found
congenial.
Thus Germany gave me support for the structural view of personality
that I had pieced together for myself. For the American Journal of Psy-
chology I wrote a brief Bericht, "The Leipzig Congress of Psychology" (1923),
outlining the various German movements that reflected the Strukturhegriff:
Gestalt, Stern's Personalistik, Krueger's complex qualities, and the school of
Verstehen. From Stern in particular I learned that a chasm exists between
the common variety of differential psychology (which he himself had largely
invented along with the concept of the IQ) and a truly personalistic psy-
chology that focuses upon the organization, not the mere profiling, of an
individual's traits.
I became acquainted also with German doctrines of types. Among them
were the elaborate speculations and investigations of E. R. Jaensch on eidetic
imagery. I ventured to replicate some of his work a year later while in
Cambridge, England. Three papers resulted: "Eidetic Imagery" (1924), "The
Eidetic Image and the After-image" (1928), and "Change and Decay in the
Visual Memory Image" (1930). Later I was horrified by Jaensch's prostitu-
tion of his scientific work to provide psychological underpinning for Nazi
doctrine. His paranoid efforts explained to me some of the weaker portions
of his earlier eidetic theory.
The year in England was spent largely in absorbing my German ex-
GORDON W. ALLPORT II

periences. Professor Frederic Bartlett was courteous in providing me with

facilities for work. Ivor A. Richards invited me to contribute a paper on "The
Standpoint of Gestalt Psychology" to Psyche (1924); but I confess I chiefly
ruminated on my German year and enjoyed myself by studying Faust with
Professor Breue!.
Thus did my years of formal training come to an end. A cable from
Professor Ford offered me an instructorship in social ethics at Harvard to
begin in the fall of 1924. Besides taking over his course on social problems
and social policy, I was invited to offer a new course in the psychology of
personality-a pioneer enterprise.

1924-1930

Temperamentally I am a bit of a worrier, and for this reason I prepared

my courses with conscientious thoroughness. When my chairman, Dr. Richard
Cabot, implied that my platform manner "lacked fire" I tried to add anima-
tion to substance in my teaching. Ada and I were married in 1925, and for
forty years she has had to tolerate the strain that marks all my preparations.
Our son Robert Bradlee was born in 1927 after we had moved to Dart-
mouth College. He later became a pediatrician, and it pleased me to find
myself sandwiched between two generations of physicians.
Profoundly important professional friendships resulted from my first two
years of teaching at Harvard. The first was with Dr. Richard Cabot, who
held a double professorship at Harvard in cardiology and in social ethics. He
proved to be a man of remarkably forthright social conscience. At the top
of his field in medicine, he somehow found time to establish medical social
service, to write many lucid volumes in medicine and in ethics, and to stir un-
dergraduates profoundly with his uncompromising teaching of his own Puritan
brand of ethics. Himself a wealthy Boston Brahmin, Cabot followed a theory
and practice of philanthropy that appealed directly to my own sense of values.
He believed as strongly as I in the integrity of each individual human life
and would give financial and spiritual assistance when he felt he could aid
in another's growth at some critical and crescent moment. (In 1936 he gave
me support so that I could take a semester of free time to complete my book
Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, 1937.) Gradually I became in-
volved in his projects, inheriting after his death the general supervision of
the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (Powers and Witmer, 195 I). Like-
a
wise he asked me to be trustee of the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust which has
continued year by year to carry through his own philanthropic conception
of "backing persons with projects." In connection with this Trust I have
been associated with Dr. Cabot's famous successor, Dr. Paul Dudley White,
and with other friends in a unique and highly congenial philanthropic ac-
tivity.
12 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

My second friendship was formed with Edwin G. Boring who had come
to Harvard while I was studying abroad. Fearing that my appointment in
social ethics might remove me from psychology proper, I asked Boring if I
could assist him in his introductory course, the famous Psychology 1. He
agreed to the arrangement, and so I gained some experience teaching sections
in experimental psychology (but not in arranging demonstrations, at which
I should certainly be a failure). With Boring's encouragement I wrote further
on imagery (1928). Acquaintance with a man of such amazing strenuosity
and profound personal integrity, such deep historical erudition, and meticulous
standards was, and is, a great influence and a major gratification in my
career.
Less intimate, but likewise influential, was my contact with William
McDougall. I assisted him as well as Boring in his elementary course. Need-
less to say, the two courses were in marked contrast. Although I admired
McDougall for his vigor and independence, I harbored all the prevailing
anti-l\lcDougall prejudices. I deplored his doctrines of instinct, interactionism,
and the group mind (all of which I, like most other Americans, only half
understood). Although Germany had converted me from my undergraduate
semifaith in behaviorism, I felt that McDougall's antagonism to the prevail-
ing American psychological creed went too far. His solution to the causal-
purposive problem seemed as dualistic as Munsterberg's, and no more satis-
factory. At the same time I was fully exposed to his point of view and found
it became more persuasive in later years. McDougall always had a bad press
in America. In spite of his forensic gifts, his British style of polemic di-
minished his effectiveness. After about seven years at Harvard he moved to
Duke University where he continued his monumental heresies until his
death in 1938. To Duke he brought my other teacher and friend, William
Stern, a Hitler fugitive who outlived McDougall by two years. He also
provided a haven for Rhine and his parapsychological research, once again
exhibiting his independence of the prevailing psychological ethos.
My brother had left Harvard for the University of North Carolina be-
fore my instructorship began. Besides our joint article we published "A Test for
Ascendance=Submission" in 1928. This was a scale to measure dominant and
submissive tendencies (one of the earliest pencil-and-paper personality tests).
Apart from these two papers we never collaborated, even though we have
occasionally helped each other with criticism. The truth, of course, is that
our psychological views diverged. His Social Psychology (1924) was too be-
havioristic and too psychoanalytic for my taste. While our later works on
political and social attitudes and on prejudice were similar in orientation,
his theories became more positivistic, more monistic, and in a sense more
interdisciplinary than my own. Floyd was a stricter logician and more sys-
tematic in his use of method than I. It should also be said that he had
artistic, musical, and manual giftedness that I lacked. Over the years we
pursued our own ways, but because of our common and unusual surname
GORDON W. ALLPORT 13

and divergence of points of view we managed to confuse students and the

public. Were there one or two Allports?
It is clear to me now that the common quality in Stern, McDougall,
Boring, Cabot, and my brother is a fierce personal and professional integrity.
Unconsciously no doubt I have drawn much encouragement from them in
pursuing my own personal idea in the face of contrary fashion.
To this list of senior intellectual mentors and friends I must add the
name of Pitirim A. Sorokin, whom I met when he came to Harvard in 1930
to head the Department of Sociology (to replace Social Ethics). Later I
dedicated my book Becoming (1955) to this colleague of powerful erudition
and blazing conviction. How he maintained his own moral and intellectual
integrity during the Russian Communist Revolution he himself tells in his
autobiography, A Long Journey (1964). In comparing my life with his I
realize how sheltered my own career has been.
Another influential figure has been my amiable and supportive col-
league Harry A. Murray. Our fields of interest lie so close together that by
unspoken agreement we allow a "narcissism of slight differences" to keep us
in a state of friendly separation. I derive from Murray a great deal of stimula-
tion and encouragement.
Somewhat later, in the 1940's, I met Peter A. Bertocci, now Bowne
Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, devoted to the personalist
school of thought and well read in psychological theory. Over the years we
have had frequent amiable arguments in and out of print. While he approves
the general trend of my thought, he would like me to subscribe to an agent-
self and to a larger measure of voluntarism. On these issues I demur, but I
deeply prize his philosophical monitoring and his friendship.
An offer from Charles Stone at Dartmouth now broke my connection
with Harvard for a period of four years. In Hanover I found myself in a
pleasant and more relaxed atmosphere, free to pursue my own inclinations.
I helped with the general introductory course and taught both social psy-
chology and personality. During summer sessions I generally returned to
teach at Harvard. The Baker Library during the long winter days at Hanover
provided me with German journals so that I could keep abreast of thinking
in typology, Gestalt, and Verstehen. Ever since the days of my thesis I had
been haunted with the idea that I should write a general book on personality.
Hanover gave me an opportunity to read and to think about this project. As
one product, I might mention my first professional paper offered at the Ninth
International Congress, held at Yale in 1929. It was titled "What Is a Trait
of Personality?" (1931). The problem of the structure of personality was
already much on my mind. (I resumed the theme thirty-six years later in a
lecture to the APA in 1965, acknowledging my Distinguished Scientific Con-
tribution Award. I titled it "Traits Revisited.")
Among my Dartmouth undergraduate students were Hadley Cantril,
Henry Odbert, Leonard Doob, all of whom followed me to Harvard for
14 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

their Ph.D. degrees. When l\1cDougall left Harvard there was a gap in the
area of social psychology. During 1928 Boring invited me to return as as-
sistant professor, but it was September 1930 before I entered upon this final
academic assignment. It is obvious to the reader that I had from 1915 a deep
attachment to Harvard-an infatuation that has continued to this day.

1930-1946

Back in Cambridge the frenzy began. In Hanover I had started an

editorial connection with the Psychological Bulletin, being responsible for
survey articles in the field of social psychology, and I had formed the habit
of reading the Psychological Abstracts from cover to cover (a habit soon
extinguished by competing stimuli). All in all I felt fairly familiar with
the then current field of general psychology and so enjoyed colloquia and
luncheon discussions with my colleagues: Boring, Pratt, Beebe-Center, Chap-
man, Murray, White, and others. Graduate students in social psychology
formed a band we called "The Group Mind." For some years we met to
discuss one another's research programs in the fields of attitudes, expressive
behavior, propaganda, and radio. Philip Vernon came from England for a
time and brought a tornado of initiative. With him I was able to work out
two investigations of lasting significance: Studies in Expressive Movement
(1933) and A Study of Values (1931). Both of these projects rested upon
my own German background but were sparked by Vernon's energy. A Study
of Values was an attempt to establish empirically the six primary dimensions
of personal values defined by Eduard Spranger, my Berlin teacher: the
theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. The resulting
test, although unconventional in many ways, has shown astonishing vitality
over the years. Gardner Lindzey assisted with a revision in 1951 and again
in 1960. It is my contention that a measuring instrument in the field of
personality is far better if based on good a priori analysis than if based on
factorial or other adventitiously achieved dimensions.
My mention of Vernon and Lindzey leads me to a warm and grateful
acknowledgment of the happy collaboration I have enjoyed with many of
my students. My joint publications (listed in the bibliography published as
an appendix to Personality and Social Encounter, 1964) include as co-
authors, besides Vernon and Lindzey, the names of Hadley Cantril, Henry
Odbert, Leo Postman, Jerome Bruner, Bernard Kramer, James Gillespie,
Thomas Pettigrew, and a dozen others. I can only hope they have shared
my satisfaction in our joint labors.
Psychology was a rapidly growing subject in the 1930's. The social
emphasis was suddenly enhanced by the impact of world events: the de-
pression, the rise of Hitler, the threat of war, and other fractures in the
social edifice. There were relatively few social psychologists. Thus a host of
GORDON W. ALLPORT 15

responsibilities came my way. The Social Science Research Council and

National Research Council wanted me for committees. The Journal of Ab-
normal and Social Psychology wanted me as editor. After Boring had suc-
cessfully piloted a final break between philosophy and psychology at Harvard,
he wanted me to assume chairmanship of the now finally independent De-
partment of Psychology. Lashley joined the department, and I was promoted
to the third permanency on the staff (1937). Astonishing to me was my
election as president of the American Psychological Association for the year
1939.
But for me the event of chief significance in this decade was the pub-
lication by Holt of Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937). This
book, as I have said, had been "cooking" in my head since my graduate
days. My ambition was to give a psychological definition of the field of per-
sonality as I saw it. My vision, of course, was influenced by my encounters
with social ethics, Anglo-American empiricism and German structural and
personalistic theories. I wanted to fashion an experimental science, so far as
appropriate, but chiefly I wanted an "image of man" that would allow us to
test in full whatever democratic and humane potentialities that he might
possess. I did not think of man as innately "good," but I was convinced that
by and large American psychology gave man less than his due by depicting
him as a bundle of unrelated reaction tendencies. I did not write the book
for any particular audience. I wrote it simply because I felt I had to define
the new field of the psychology of personality as I saw it. Although there
were books in the related areas of mental hygiene and abnormal psychology,
I regarded my own approach as being in the tradition of academic psychology,
and I felt that my emphasis should be on normality rather than on pathology.
I also had a desire to avoid jargon and to try to express my thoughts in proper
and felicitous English. The result was that some readers regarded the book
as difficult and pretentious, others labelled it as "classic," and for twenty-five
years it stood as more or less standard reading in the field. Perhaps its major
importance was that it defined (for the first time) the topics which well-bred
texts in the field of personality should cover.
To establish my main point (that a full-bodied psychology of the human
person is possible) I had to devise and adapt a number of rather novel
supporting propositions. Chief among them was the concept of functional
autonomy. No theory of motivation, I maintained, could be adequate if
based on the exclusive primacy of drives and on the reactive aspects of
human nature. I hesitated to adopt McDougall's concept of purpose because
it was anchored to dubious instinct theory. I felt that in the course of life,
motives can, and usually do, undergo radical transformation and that the
propelling force lay in the present on-moving structure of personality, not
in some anachronistic conditioning of past motives. The book also empha-
sized the neglected topics of expressive behavior and faced up to the problem
of the normative criteria for maturity. It dealt with the epistemological prob-
16 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

lem of our knowledge of other personalities and throughout reiterated the

challenge that any adequate psychology of personality must deal with the
essential uniqueness of every personal structure. The latter insistence, of
course, scandalized readers who felt that a man's individuality was suffi-
ciently dealt with by regarding him as a point of intersecting common dimen-
sions. I never implied that differential psychology was irrelevant to the psy-
chology of personality, but I did insist that our science was at fault for
neglecting the problem of patterning. When at long last I undertook a com-
plete rewriting of this text in order to update the material and simplify the
exposition, I selected the title Pattern and Growth in Personality (1961).
While my chief intellectual love has always been personality theory,
perhaps half of my research and writing has dealt with more general topics
in social psychology. Even while working on Personality I took time off to
dig as deeply as I could into the concept of "attitude," which resulted in my
topical chapter, under this title, in C. C. Murchison's Handbook of Social
Psychology (1935). A number of papers on social attitudes and newspaper
psychology and a book on The Psychology of Radio (with Cantril, 1935)
attest the same interest.
W orId War II placed a still heavier demand on social psychologists.
Although I served with the Emergency Committee in Psychology under the
APA, I avoided offers of employment in government agencies. My abilities,
I felt, were not equal to the urgent and often vague demands placed upon
the new agencies proliferating overnight in Washington. I felt that if I had
any contribution to make, it would be best made by remaining at Harvard.
Telephone lines were hot with the inquiry, "What do we know about civilian
morale?" Speaking for myself, I knew nothing. But, in collaboration with
Harry Murray, I decided some useful things might be discovered if we offered
a seminar in "morale research." Until Murray himself was called to Washing-
ton to head an important project for the Office of Strategic Services, we di-
rected a number of student projects, ranging in type from an analysis of
Hitler's character to studies of wartime rumor and riots. A bound (but not
published) volume resulted entitled Worksheets in Morale.
The seminar had a long-range consequence. It continued year after
year, with a gradual focusing on what seemed to be the most urgent problem
of national unity, namely, group conflict and prejudice. The products of this
seminar over a twenty-five-year period have been numerous. I shall speak of
them later.
Meanwhile there were other wartime demands. Ever since the advent
of Hitler in 1933, a flood of refugee psychologists was pouring into the United
States, many of them the finest type of scholar: Koffka , Stern, Kohler, Lewin,
Werner, Egan and Else Brunswik, and many others. To find jobs for such
stars was not difficult, but the second string of unknown refugees created a
serious problem. Together with Barbara Burks, Gardner Murphy, and others,
I did what I could to make contacts for them. The refugee problem had great
GORDON W. ALLPORT 17

interest for sociologists as well as for psychologists. J. S. Bruner and E. M.

Jandorf collaborated with me in publishing an analysis of ninety personal
documents written by Hitler fugitives under the title "Personality under So-
cial Catastrophe" (1941).
Some of my time was given to making speeches, semipopular writing on
morale, and rumor analysis, leading to a daily syndicated feature in the
Boston Traveler entitled "Rumor Clinic" in which we endeavored to scotch
harmful wartime rumors. We classified them as of three types: "bogies,"
Hpipe dreams," and "wedge-drivers." The third type, based on prejudice and
group antagonism, was the most serious. For much of this work I leaned
upon the investigations of my student Robert H. Knapp. Soon Leo Post-
man joined forces with me in giving a course on race relations to Boston
police officers and in publishing a book The Psychology of Rumor (1947).
As the close of the war approached, many psychologists became con-
cerned with the conditions required for writing a lasting and effective peace.
I pointed up a statement signed by 2038 psychologists entitled "Human Na-
ture and the Peace" and published it in the Psychological Bulletin (1945).
In retrospect our formula for peace may seem somewhat quixotic, but it still
stands as a tribute to the social ideals of our profession.
The profound public concern of most American social psychologists,
not only in wartime but throughout these troubled decades, is a fact worthy
of comment. In 1936 the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
(SPSSI) was born. Early leaders included Gardner Murphy, Goodwin Wat-
son, George Hartmann, Kurt Lewin, Edward Tolman, and Theodore New-
comb. I served as president of the Society in 1944. l\1y membership in this
group is one that I find congenial, for at heart I am both a political liberal
and a social reformer.
From my early Dartmouth days I had found close intellectual and per-
sonal companionship with my student Hadley Cantril. We both wanted to
fashion a social psychology that would be accurate and applicable to sig-
nificant problems. Between us we called it "L-P" (Lehenspsychologie). Our
book about the psychology of radio (1935) was one product of our collabora-
tion. He was director of the "Tensions Project" at UNESCO in Paris and
invited me to attend a memorable conference there in 1948, resulting in
the book he edited, Tensions that Cause Wars (1950). For it I wrote a chap-
ter entitled "The Role of Expectancy."
As the war drew to a close, most of my colleagues and students, it
seemed, were in Washington or in the armed services. For us stay-at-homes
it became necessary to plan on a huge postwar influx of veterans into our
universities. In particular at Harvard we faced a local situation of some
urgency. Although I was continuing as chairman of the Department of
Psychology it seems that some far-reaching type of change was needed. Our
department, like that of sociology, was small. The interests of our own staff
were clearly divided, with the "biotropes" (Boring, Stevens, Lashley, Beebe-
18 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Center) on one side and the "sociotropes" (the terms are Boring's) on the
other (Murray, White, Allport). A corresponding division of interest was
evident in the Department of Anthropology, with Kluckhohn, representing
cultural anthropology, finding much in common with sociologists and socio-
tropes. Together a group consisting of Parsons, Murray, Kluckhohn, Mowrer,
and myself held many meetings devising a new department. To change any
basic organization within a university (especially within an older institution)
is a task as cumbersome as moving a cemetery. However, plans were laid,
and in January 1946 the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted that the new
department should be created.
Before leaving this era I wish to report a stroke of personal good fortune.
During the last three years of my chairmanship of the Department of Psy-
chology, Mrs. Eleanor D. Sprague served as my secretary. She continued with
me in the new department, where my administrative job was chairmanship
of the Committee of Higher Degrees. She was my right hand until her retire-
ment in 1964. Thanks to her competent assistance I covered more ground
than would otherwise have been possible.

1946-1966

Six P.M. was the sacred hour of adjournment for faculty meetings. At a
meeting in January 1946 the faculty authorized the formation of the new
department but at 5: 50 P.M. had not yet christened it. The name Human
Relations was suggested, but that would never do because Yale already had
an institute by that name. It would be too suffocating to call it the Depart-
ment of Sociology, Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Social Anthro-
pology, although that is what it was. At about 5: 59 P.M. someone proposed
"Social Relations," and owing to the lateness of the hour the name was
adopted without debate. The new organization, involving as it did a splitting
of the previous Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, was a drastic
move for Harvard and startled that portion of the academic world which
watches changes in Harvard's educational policies. But the war was over, the
need urgent, and veterans were flocking back with a keen interest in the
basic social sciences, which, they vaguely felt, must hold some solution to
the troubled world's problems.
With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Provost, Paul Buck, the new
department rapidly enlarged its staff with returning Harvard people (George
Homans, Jerome Bruner, Brewster Smith, Donald McGranahan, and others)
and with brilliant new members including Samuel Stouffer, Frederick Mostel-
ler, and Richard Solomon. A new curriculum was offered commencing in
July 1946. I myself (with George Homans) gave the introductory course for
a few years. Within a year or so it became the largest elective course in college
with nearly 900 Harvard and Radcliffe students registered in it. In fact soon
GORDON W. ALLPORT 19

after its beginning the department had large enrollments, a concentration of

about 400 undergraduates and close to 200 candidates for the Ph.D. degree.
Advanced degrees were not offered in Social Relations but rather in each
of the four constituent disciplines. The problem of the department has al
ways been to balance the needs of specialization with a measure of desired
cross-disciplinary training. Our policies have followed a wavering course be-
tween specialism and integrationism, with no satisfactory proportion yet dis-
covered.
This bold academic experiment could not have succeeded, I think, were
it not for the fact that in the course of their wartime service most of our
staff members had lost their strict academic identities. A man could be a
good social scientist whether or not his main training had been in psychology,
sociology, anthropology, statistics, or some other discipline. The war thus
prepared our minds for such integration as was achieved. Intellectual leader-
ship toward the formation of a "common language" in our field came from
Talcott Parsons, joined for a time by Edward Shils and Edward Tolman.
Whether the effort was premature or whether Harvard's tradition was one of
individualism and dissent, it did not turn out to be possible to establish a
common basic language for the department. But dyads, triads, and small
clusters of colleagues did manage to work together on projects of common
interest, and a general atmosphere of convergence prevailed. Much credit for
such unification as was achieved goes to Parsons. For ten years he was our
enthusiastic chairman and from the beginning the true leader of the enter-
prise.
As one of the department's founding fathers I was eager to see the
experiment succeed. My specific duty was to chair the Committee on Higher
Degrees (with Mrs. Sprague's able assistance) and, wherever I could, to
uphold the arms of other administrative officers. (Talcott Parsons, Robert
White, and David McClelland served successively as chairmen, and Samuel
Stouffer and Freed Bales as laboratory directors.)
My own teaching continued much as it always had. I finally dropped
the large elementary course into the able hands of Bob White and gave
over formal course instruction in social psychology to younger colleagues-
Jerry Bruner, Roger Brown, Gardner Lindzey, and more recently Herb Kel-
man, Elliot Aronson, Stanley Milgram, Kenneth Gergen, and the oncoming
procession of younger talent. I gave a middle-level course in theories of per-
sonality and conducted two graduate seminars-one for second-year graduate
candidates in clinical and social psychology and one a continuation of the
morale seminar, which had become entirely devoted to problems of group
conflict and prejudice.
It was in connection with the latter course that I directed several rele-
vant Ph.D. theses and began a series of publications of my own, climaxed
by The Nature of Prejudice (1954). To my mind the significance of this
book, which still circulates widely in a paperback edition, lies in its table of
 20 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

contents. As was the case with the field of personality, I spent several years
deciding what subject matter was truly central to a new, ill-defined psycho-
logical territory and what the proper order of topics should be in any compre-
hensive text.
While many able students collaborated in this work, one grew to the
stature of a torch-bearer. I was greatly impressed by the research abilities
and expository skills of Thomas F. Pettigrew, a Virginian. I invited him to
accompany me to South Africa as special scholar at the Institute for Social
Research at the University of Natal, where we spent six fruitful months in
1956. It was, of course, fascinating to compare the ethnic frictions of South
Africa with those of the United States and thus in a way to test the cross-
cultural validity of my recently published book. l\1y conclusion was that all
the personal forces making for prejudice were present in both lands, but that
my own psychological bias had perhaps led me to underestimate the forces
of history and of traditional social structure more strikingly evident in South
Africa.
Pettigrew and I made some cross-cultural perceptual investigations in
South Africa. One of them, entitled "Cultural Influences on the Perception
of Movement" (1957), seemed to us to show that social factors in perception
are prominent only when there is inherent ambiguity in the stimulus situa-
tion.
After a year at North Carolina, Pettigrew returned to Harvard and
gradually assumed a large portion of my own teaching and administrative
duties, adding them to his own heavy program of work in the field of race
relations. Under his direction the long-standing seminar continues to make
its contributions to the study of morale.
Returning to the field of personality theory (always central in my in-
terests), I found myself burdened with requests for named lectures in as-
sorted universities, sometimes single lectures, sometimes a series. Likewise
there were presidential and other honorific papers to prepare, as well as chap-
ters for symposia and handbooks. In fact most of my writing for the past
twenty-five years seems to have been dictated by such obligations. Each
obligation I tried to employ as an occasion to say something relevant to
personality theory. Thus, to the Eastern Psychological Association I offered
"The Ego in Contemporary Psychology" (1943). Sometimes this paper is
cited as reintroducing the concept of self into academic psychology-a bit of
an overstatement, I think. Again, the Merrick Lectures at Ohio Wesleyan
and the Lowell Lectures in Boston gave me incentive to prepare The Indi-
vidual and His Religion (1950). The assignment of the Terry Lectures at
Yale resulted in Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Per-
sonality (1955). A large number of additional occasional papers were gathered
together in Personality and Social Encounter (1960). It seemed appropriate
in this latter volume to list in an appendix my complete bibliography, re-
vised in the paperback edition (1964).
GORDON W. ALLPORT 21

To my mind there is a distinct unity in these writings, including those

on prejudice. Personality, as I see it, is composed chiefly of generic attitudes,
values, and sentiments. (See, for example, "Mental Health: A Generic Atti-
tude," 1964.) Therefore the prejudice-complex, the religious sentiment, the
phenomenological ego, and one's philosophy of life are important subterri-
tories to explore in individual lives.
While giving much of my attention to these generic formations that are
found in many, if not all, lives, I still place higher in my scale of scientific
values the search for the pattern that binds sentiments, values, and traits
within each unique individual life. I chose this theme for an address in 1961
to the Berufsverband deutscher Psychologen in Hamburg. The lecture was
titled "Das Allgemeine und das Eigenartige in der Psychologischen Praxis"
(1962). This assignment I accepted partly as an excuse for a sentimental
journey. I was happy to repay the profound stimulation that German struc-
tural concepts had given me and especially to return to the scene of my
studies with Stern almost forty years previously. But I felt too that German
psychologists might understand my plea for morphogenic (idiographic) meth-
ods, geared to the structure of individual lives, somewhat better than did
most of my American colleagues. This line of thought, of course, relates to
my perennial question, "How shall a life history be written?"
For many years I had used in my teaching a remarkable series of 300
intimate letters written by a woman from the age of fifty-eight until her
death twelve years later. The letters deal with a mother-son tangle and are
written in a fiercely dramatic, personal style. Here surely is a unique life,
calling for psychological analysis and interpretation. Having had considerable
experience in teaching with the aid of these letters, I decided to present them
as a challenge to others and to sketch the available modes of psychological
analysis applicable to this single case; thus I produced the book Letters from
Jenny (1965).
Among the occasional assignments that took much time and effort I
should mention the chapter for Lindzey's Handbook of Social Psychology
(1954) entitled "The Historical Background of Modern Social Psychology."
I had for several years offered a course in this subject and so welcomed the
opportunity to give a compendious statement of the roots of modern social
psychology as I saw them to be. Although a revision of the Handbook is now
called for, I find little to change in the chapter. Someone, however, should
write a much fuller and more detailed history of the subject.
I knew, of course, that a revision of the 1937 edition of Personality was
needed. It should be brought up to date; the account of functional autonomy
required restatement, and the new movements in the fields of cognition,
role studies, and existential theory should be included. Pattern and Growth
in Personality (1961) represented this updating and likewise a simplification
of exposition. Being older (and feeling personally more secure) now I can
dispense with my earlier inflated vocabulary.
22 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Meanwhile the Department of Social Relations had grown and grown.

With a staff of nearly 100 instructors, further evolution and change were
bound to occur. It was time to turn the controls over to younger colleagues.
The department had existed for eighteen years in seven separate buildings
and was largely cut off from the biotropic Department of Psychology. When
the Fund for Harvard College announced as one of its goals the building of
a large and inclusive Center for the Behavioral Sciences it seemed that at
last a geographical union of these disparate units might be achieved. We
moved into the new fifteen-story William James Hall in January 1965, just
as I was entering a period of semiretirement. By arrangement with President
Pusey I had agreed to teach in the fall semesters for a few years but to keep
the spring terms free for writing and travel. I found it a wrench to leave
Emerson Hall, which as student and teacher I had inhabited continuously
for fifty years (less seven years for my work abroad and the interval at
Dartmouth).
One final chapter in my formal relations with Harvard should be re-
corded. In March 1966 the Corporation appointed me the first Richard
Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics. In announcing the establishment
of this new chair President Pusey took occasion to "welcome the formal re-
appearance of Social Ethics in a community which owes much to the dedi-
cation and example of Richard Clarke Cabot and, before him, Francis Green-
wood Peabody." Pusey added that "In a time of widespread confusion about
moral issues, there is also in our day a resurgence of concern for human
and ethical values, especially for character and moral sensibility." Since
Dr. Cabot was my first "boss" at Harvard, having much influence upon my
career first and last, the appointment seemed to me to complete fittingly an
intellectual cycle as well as a cycle of sentiment.

A POLEMIC-EcLECTIC

Much of my writing is critical of prevailing psychological idols. At

times I have crossed swords with learning theory, dimensionalism in per-
sonality research, and with what seems to me to be an overemphasis on un-
conscious processes, projective tests, and simplified drive theories of motiva-
tion. I have felt that these fashionable explanatory principles are able to deal
only with the peripheral or "opportunistic" layers of personality, or else that
they make too much of some improbable formulations of depth psychology.
(Yes, my single encounter with Freud was traumatic.)
In place of (or, more accurately, as a supplement to) these popular
formulae, I have advocated what seemed to me necessary principles. These
are principles dealing with "propriate" functions (anchored to the self-
image), insightful capacities for learning, complex integrative generic atti-
tudes and ways of perceiving one's world, expressive (not merely projective)
GORDON W. ALLPORT 23

behavior, the formations that mark maturity in personality, and values and
orientations toward the future-in short, with the course of growth and becom-
ing. It is within this web of concepts that one would find my personal idea.
Bergson, of course, was right in saying that no philosophic mind ever
succeeds in fully realizing his idea. It is my experience also that such a mind
may all the while be half-distrustful of the idea's validity. Although much of
my writing is polemic in tone, I know in my bones that my opponents are
partly right.
When asked to give an occasional paper at the XVII International Con-
gress of Psychology in Washington, I titled it "The Fruits of Eclecticism:
Bitter or Sweet?" (1964). In it I tried to trace eclectic trends in the psy-
chology of the past and to argue that a systematic eclecticism is not impossible
in the future. But here I insisted that no enthusiastic particularism, however
fashionable, will ever be adequate. I implied that only a view of the "Open
System in Personality Theory" (1960) will really serve the purpose. Any
investigator, of course, has the right to restrict his variables and neglect,
momentarily, irrelevant aspects of behavior, but he has no right to forget what
he has decided to neglect.
As I have said elsewhere, some of my colleagues treat personality as a
quasi-closed system. I respect their work and know that eventually their
contributions will fit into the larger frame. I feel no personal animosity
toward the associates with whom I have ventured to disagree. But what I
dislike in our profession is the strong aura of arrogance found in presently
fashionable dogmas. To my mind humility is a virtue appropriate for social
and psychological scientists to cultivate. I am not fond of the label "be-
havioral sciences" now in vogue. From a certain point of view it is harmless
enough, but to me it somehow implies that if we were all to embrace the
creeds of positivism and behaviorism, all our problems would be solved. I
cannot agree. Our methods would be restricted, our theories one-sided, and
our students would be intimidated by a tyrannical and temporary scientism.
Humility requires a more tentative position. William James was right-our
knowledge is a drop, our ignorance a sea. James himself, to my mind, sets a
worthy model for psychologists to follow in his open-rnindedness, his respect
for multiple avenues to truth, and his personal humility.
The irrelevance of much present-day psychology to human life comes
from its emphasis on mechanical aspects of reactivity to the neglect of man's
wider experiences, his aspirations, and his incessant endeavor to master and
to mould his environment. Of course not all psychologists have this blind
spot. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Gardner Murphy, Harry Murray, and
many others have clearer vision.
What then is my personal idea? I suppose it has to do with the search
for a theoretical system-for one that will allow for truth wherever found,
one that will encompass the totality of human experience and do full justice
to the nature of man. I myself have never had a strictly defined program of
24 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

research, nor have I tried to establish a "school" of psychological thought.

Students who have worked with me have been encouraged to tackle any
significant problem, so long as it dealt with persons, with parts of persons,
or with groups of persons.
Dedicated as I am to a program so broad and loose, I fmd it surprising
that many specific honors have come my way. I shall report only one-the
one that has pleased me most deeply, for it succeeds in summing up my
personal idea better than I can do. In connection with the XVII Interna-
tional Congress of Psychology, which met in Washington in 1963, fifty-five
of my former Ph.D. students presented me with two handsomely bound vol-
umes of their own writings with the following dedicatory inscription: "From
his students-in appreciation of his respect for their individuality." This is an
intimate honor, and one I prize above all others.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Gordon W. Allport
(with F. H. Allport) Personality traits: their classification and measurement.
]. ahnorm. soc. Psychol., 1921, 16,6-40.
An experimental study of the traits of personality: with special reference to the
problem of social diagnosis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard College
Library, 1922.
The Leipzig congress of psychology. Amer. ]. Psychol., 1923, 34,612-615.
The standpoint of Gestalt psychology. Psyche, 1924, 4, 354-361.
Eidetic imagery. Brit. ]. Psychol., 1924, 15,99-120.
The eidetic image and the after-image. Amer. J. Psychol., 1928, 40, 418-425.
(with F. H. Allport) A test for ascendance-submission. J. abnorm. soc. Psycho!.,
1928, 23, 118-136.
Change and decay in the visual memory image. Brit. ]. Psycho!., 1930, 21, 133-
148.
What is a trait of personality? J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1931, 25, 368-372.
(with P. E. Vernon) A study of values. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931; revised
eds. (and G. Lindzey) 1951, 1960.
(with P. E. Vernon) Studies in expressive movement. New York: Macmillan,
1933.
(with H. Cantril) The psychology of radio. New York: Harper & Row, 1935.
Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A handbook of social psychology. Worcester,
Mass.: Clark U niver. Press, 1935, ch. 17.
Personality: a psychological interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston, 1937.
(with J. S. Bruner & E. M. Jandorf) Personality under social catastrophe: ninety
life-histories of the Nazi revolution. Charact. &- Pers., 1941, 10, 1-22.
The use of personal documents in psychological science. New York: Social Sci-
ence Research Council, 1942, Bull. 49.
The ego in contemporary psychology. Psychol. Rev., 1943, 50, 451-478.
GORDON W. ALLPORT 25
Human nature and the peace. Psychol. Bull. 1945, 42, 376-378.
(with L. Postman) The psychology of rumor. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1947.
The individual and his religion. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
The trend in motivational theory. Amer. ]. Orthopsychiat., 1953, 25, 107-119.
The historical background of modern social psychology. In G. Lindzey (Ed.),
Handbook of social psychology, Vol. 1. Reading, Mass.. Addison-Wesley, 1954,
ch. 1.
The nature of prejudice. Reading, l\1ass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954; abridged ed.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1958.
Becoming: basic considerations for a psychology of personality. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale. 1955.
(with T. F. Pettigrew) Cultural influences on the perception of movement: the
trapezoidal illusion among Zulus. J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1957, 55, 104-113.
The open system in personality theory. J. ahnorm, soc. Psychol., 1960, 61, 301-
310.
Personality and social encounter; selected essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960; re-
vised ed., 1964.
Pattern and growth in personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.
Das Allgemeine und das Eigenartige in der psychologischen Praxis. Psychol.
Beitrage, 1962, 6, 630-650.
The fruits of eclecticism: bitter or sweet? Proceedings of the XVII International
Congress of Psychology, Amsterdam, 1964; also published in Psychologia,
1964, 7, 1-14; and in Acta Psychol., 1964,23, 27-44.
Mental health: a generic attitude. ]. Relig. Hlth, 1964, 4, 7-2l.
Letters from Jenny. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.

Other Publications Cited

Allport, F. H. Social psychology. Boston: Houghton Mifllin, 1924.

Cantril, H. (Ed.) Tensions that cause wars. Urbana: Univer. of Illinois Press,
1950.
Miinsterberg, H. Psychology; general and applied. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1914.
Murray, H. A. What should psychologists do about psychoanalysis? [. abnorm.
soc. Psychol., 1940,35,150-175.
Powers, E. & Witmer, Helen. An experiment in the prevention of delinquency.
New York: Columbia, 1951.
Sorokin, P. A. A long journey. New Haven: College & University Press, 1964.
 The Smithsonian Institution

27
Leonard Carmichael

I was born on November 9, 1898, in the Germantown section of Phila-

delphia, Pennsylvania. I am an only child. I come from a predominantly
professional family. My father was a successful physician with a special in-
terest in neuroanatomy and neurology. If his IQ had been measured, it would
have been very high. He was a traveled and broadly informed man. My
mother, Emily Henrietta Leonard, did her major work in logic and psychology
at Wellesley College where she established lifelong friendships with M. W.
Calkins, the "self-psychologist," and E. A. McC. Gamble, an authority on the
psychology of taste and smell. Before her marriage my mother taught at Miss
Porter's School (Farmington) and went on to be vice president, to use the
present title, of the State Teachers College at Fitchburg, Massachusetts. As
a young matron in Philadelphia she early became active in the work of vol-
unteer charitable boards. Her interests, I now see, were centered in agencies
concerned with helping children and the indigent ill. She also organized a
successful movement to save a fme eighteenth-century house in Germantown.
At the time of her death she had been for eight years chief of the Bureau
of Recreation of the City of Philadelphia. This appointive post was, I be-
lieve, the highest position held up to that time by any woman in the city
government of Philadelphia.
My father's family on the Carmichael side came from the North of Ire-
land (county, Londonderry). Some of them had been clergymen in the
Anglican Church of Ireland. My maternal grandmother came to Philadelphia
from the British West Indies. Her family were plantation owners and clergy-
men.
My mother's father, Charles Hall Leonard, D.D., LL.D., was professor
of homiletics and for many years dean of the Crane Theological School of
Tufts University. I suspect he was a master of his subject because the famous
Phillips Brooks journeyed out from Boston for a full term to take his lectures.
He lived to be ninety-six years old and even published a book after he was
ninety. His father had been a small manufacturer and represented Haverhill
in the General Court (the state legislature of Massachusetts). My maternal
grandmother, Phebe Bassett, was a teacher of mathematics before her mar-
riage. She had studied Greek and Latin at Brook Farm, the famous New Eng-

29
30 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

land transcendentalist utopian community. Her lifelong interest was in the

branch of mathematics called celestial mechanics. She found her recreation
in astronomical computations such as those required in establishing the orbits
of comets. Through this grandmother's line I am descended from a colonial
American of some distinction, Wyseman Clagett. The Dictionary of Amer-
ican Biography says of this ancestor that he was the last chief legal officer
of the Crown in the colony of New Hampshire and the first such officer in the
new state of New Hampshire. He largely wrote its constitution. A fine por-
trait of his wife, now in the Brooklyn Museum, was painted by Blackburn,
who had as sitters many of the notable families of the 1750's in New Eng-
land. I own a good oil copy of this portrait.
It was my good fortune to attend what was at the time, and probably
still is, one of the best and largest private secondary day schools in America,
the Germantown Friends School, though my parents were not Quakers but
Episcopalians. In school I was, I think, only a high average student and occa-
sionally on the honor roll. Each year the faculty of the school devised a
printed examination, an "Information Test," that was given to the entire
upper school without previous warning. Its detailed questions ranged over
science, history, biography, and current events. Perhaps in this respect I
achieved distinction outside of regular courses by scoring highest in the whole
school several times.
Several of my teachers have had a profound influence on me throughout
my entire life. Among them was H. A. Domincovich, a teacher of Latin
and English and an outstandingly brilliant man. Another was an excellent art
teacher, who was herself an artist of real ability. She taught me the pleasure
of going to art galleries and to periodic gallery shows and introduced me to a
number of well known artists. From this teacher, Miss E. H. Schick, I learned
the elements of drawing, a skill that later helped me very distinctly in my
college study of zoology. A few of my anatomical drawings are still included
in various textbooks of zoology and psychology. This early and continuing
interest in art proved to be a very real help to me when later in life I found
myself, as secretary of the Smithsonian, concerned with the management of
four great galleries of art that are bureaus of the Smithsonian Institution.
I certainly was not an outstanding athlete, but participating in sports
meant much to me. I won school letters for playing on the first team in
basketball, football, and soccer. I was also editor of the school paper and
president of my class. I was given a cane, an old tradition, by my class, as its
most popular member. Many of my lifelong friendships were formed in this
school.
Germantown, for more than a century technically a part of Philadelphia,
retained in my boyhood its independent character as an old community. Cer-
tainly it seemed to me then and now to be an ideal place in which to grow
up. Germantown had all the advantages of being part of what some have
called America's most historic and also most artistic and culturally sophisti-
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 31

cated city, but the Germantown part of Philadelphia also provided many of
the advantages of country living. The house I was born in was large and dis-
tinctive enough to be included in a dehnitive book on historical houses of
Philadelephia. Part of it dated back to a time before the hard-fought Revolu-
tionary Battle of Germantown in which General Washington was defeated.
The history of Germantown, its old Georgian mansions, its beautiful old
mahogany furniture, and the hand tools of its artisans had an abiding fascina-
tion for me. My senior essay at school was written on the pietistic German
university men who established in the seventeenth century an astronomical
observatory in Germantown.
My friends and I early gained an interest in natural history from our
teachers and from our books. I made a fair collection of the butterflies and
moths of this region and mounted them with care.
The house in which I was born had its own stables, outbuildings, and
large flower and vegetable gardens. From our gardener I learned something
of the old-world nurture of plants. Gardening has been one of my continuing
interests. A chauffeur of my father's taught me the proper use and care of
basic woodworking and metalworking hand tools, and even the elements of
blacksmithing. Later, in laboratory shops and at home, the use of tools has
been a pleasant part of my life.
As a child I read constantly, going through the plays of Shakespeare,
many of the works of Thackeray, and my favorite, Anthony Trollope, whom
I now consider the greatest psychologist among novelists.
History has always interested me. College courses in history made this
subject a minor interest of mine through life. Before going to college I had
read such books as Bergson's Creative Evolution, Royce's The Spirit of Mod-
ern Philosophy, and the two volumes of my mother's Hrst edition of James'
Principles of Psychology with her good notes in the margin. She had studied
this book under the direction of Yale's distinguished psychologist George
Trumbull Ladd. It is indeed fortunate for one to have parents with scientific
interests and a well-stocked library! Our conversation at home was about
books, letters, and science. Sermons were employed to teach me the prin-
ciples of formal logic. It was a rare dinner when someone did not rush for
the encyclopedia to prove a point.
As I have noted, my grandfather was a dean at Tufts, and my uncles had
gone to this college. I entered Tufts in 1917 and was graduated four years
later with the B.S. degree, summa cum laude, and academically second in my
class. I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. After America entered the
war, I volunteered; but as soon as I put on my uniform as a private, I was
assigned to help in a course in military sanitation and hygiene.
As an undergraduate I was an active member of the Theta Delta Chi
Fraternity of which my uncles had also been members. Fraternity life, often
criticized today, was for me both pleasant and worthwhile. I was almost too
involved in extracurricular affairs. I was editor-in-chief of the undergraduate
32 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

college paper. president of the college dramatic society, and had other duties
and offices. Each day I wrote news about the academic, social, and athletic
events at Tufts for the then famous Boston Transcript.
After receiving my freshman marks I applied for a scholarship and found
that since my father's income was at a satisfactory level I was not eligible.
This so-called "financial means test" for the award of scholarships and aca-
demic honors. commonly practiced by colleges, annoyed me then and has
continued to annoy me. I at once applied for an assistantship in biology,
which I received, for which there was no "means test." This meant that be-
sides my own studies and extracurricular activities, afternoons during my
college years were spent as a laboratory assistant in zoology. This science
became my major interest. I believe that I have worked hard all my life, but
never harder than when I was a college undergraduate. Morning after morn-
ing I set my alarm for 4 A.M. or even earlier in order to get essential studying
done.
Laboratory teaching was interesting and I profited by it. In a limited
way this teaching made me something of a comparative anatomist and his-
tologist. In my senior year H. V. Neal, my major professor of zoology, al-
lowed me to do a small research problem on the embryology of the eye
muscles in one of the sharks. This started my great interest in the signifi-
cance and the evolutionary history of sense organs as directors of animal
behavior. It also showed me how basic is the science of descriptive and ex-
perimental embryology. As a college senior I thus decided that I wanted to
spend the rest of my life learning all I could about the sense organs and
especially about the role of the receptors in determining the discriminations
that organisms make in their adaptive responses to varied environmental
energies. At this time I was almost equally attracted to the study of anatomy,
physiology, embryology, and especially the study of animal behavior as seen
in the quantifiable tropistic reactions that were then being most actively
in vesti gated.
The two men whose books influenced me most as an undergraduate
were the biological ultramechanist Jacques Loeb and the proponent of emer-
gent evolution C. Lloyd Morgan. I finally decided, especially after reading
Howard C. Warren's Human Psychology, that psychology rather than anat-
omy or physiology was the best place for me to anchor a study of the sense
organs when considered in a general functional and biological setting.
The question then arose as to the place for graduate work. My father
had generously agreed to support me as long as I wished to study. E. B. Twit-
myer, the able and objectively-minded psychologist at the University of
Pennsylvania, offered me a very generous Harrison Fellowship, but I decided
to go to Harvard for my graduate work.
A teacher at Tufts, Edwin A. Shaw had taken his Ph.D. at Harvard in
educational psychology under Walter F. Dearborn. He suggested that I go
to Cambridge and talk to Dearborn about studying psychology at Harvard.
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 33

Dearborn offered me a much smaller fellowship than the one at Pennsyl-

vania. I accepted, although I told him I was not primarily interested in edu-
cation with a capital "E." Dearborn told me that in his opinion all psychology
and especially educational psychology was most likely to be advanced by
people who understood and maintained a basic biological approach to the
science. He therefore most cordially urged me to accept the fellowship on my
terms, and he assured me that I could take any pattern of graduate courses
at Harvard that I wished in preparation for the Ph.D. degree. During my
three years at Harvard as a graduate student I therefore took a number of
courses in zoology as well as psychology. Indeed, the first piece of graduate
lahoratory research I undertook was a quantitative study of the light reac-
tions of the meal worm CTenebrio niolitor ), It will never be possible for me to
overemphasize the importance of the privilege of studying so closely during
these years with the man who directed this research, C. H. Parker, then a
professor of zoology at Harvard. His graduate lectures on the nervous sys-
tem and the sense organs were models of clarity and scholarship. I tried to
emulate his lectures in all my later teaching.
Among the experiences at Harvard for which I am most grateful was
the opportunity to take the courses or to audit the lectures of such distin-
guished teachers as the great E. C. Boring, L. T. Troland, and William
McDougall.
Throughout my graduate years, my association with Dearborn was espe-
cially close and satisfactory. He assigned me, for my own exclusive use, a
Iine large office and an adjoining research room on the third floor of Emerson
Hall. These were rooms once used by Hugo Munsterberg. Dearborn gave me
the privilege of rebuilding in the Harvard shop an improved model of the
famous Dodge-Dearborn eye movement recording camera. In the laboratory
shop I worked at a bench with Troland and thus came to know him quite
well. Troland introduced me to a quantitative and truly functional or opera-
tional point of view in psychology.
At Harvard I did experimental work in the zoological laboratory and in
Emerson Hall. Much of my time was spent in apparatus construction and
in learning new biological techniques basic to later behavior study. Dearborn
introduced me to W. R. Miles, then at the Carnegie Institution of Wash-
ington's Nutrition Laboratory adjacent to the Harvard Medical School. In
Miles' laboratory I had the privilege of watching the use of string galva-
nometers and other advanced pieces of physiological and psychological ap-
paratus. This laboratory allowed me to formulate an idea of what a really
well-equipped psychological laboratory could be. It also started me on a life-
time of admiration of this really distinguished man.
When it came time for me to select a topic for my Ph.D. thesis I talked
at length with Dearborn about my basic interest in the sensory control or
release of inborn patterns of behavior. This led both student and teacher to
much discussion of the psychology and biology of so-called "human and ani-
 34 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

mal instincts." Finally Dearborn convinced me that it would be most ad-

vantageous for me at this time in my career to do my dissertation on a
theoretical and historical subject. The result of this decision was that I pre-
pared a 445-page analysis of the history of technical thought about human
and animal instincts as my Ph.D. thesis. A summary of some of the conclu-
sions of this paper was later published under the title "Heredity and En-
vironment: Are They Antithetical?" (1925). This title was not mine but
was selected in an oral conference with Morton Prince, then the editor of
the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. He had talked to me about
my thesis and asked me to write the paper for him. In his charming manner
he pounded his desk and said, "Give it a title people will sit up and notice!"
Prince is another psychologist whom I consider myself fortunate to have
known well. He was an original thinker in addition to being a wealthy,
dashing, sport-loving gentleman.
In reviewing the literature for my thesis I became especially interested
in the German publications of William Preyer. Later this scientist's book,
Specielle Physiologie des Embryo, Untersuchungen ii-ber die Lebenserschein-
ungen vor der Ceburt, opened my eyes to the specific area of research in my
chosen field of the sensory and neural control of behavior on which I was
to spend many years. The accidental finding of this book, which I had never
heard of before, in the Harvard library was a turning point in my life. Here
at last I saw a way to investigate the topic of major interest to me-the
morphological growth of the receptors and nervous system in relation to
changes in behavior as responses are released at various stages during the
early ontogenetic development in each mammal before learning begins or at
least before it becomes important.
During my Harvard student years I also did the research that was basic
to my part of a monograph, Special Disabilities in Learning to Read and
Write, which was published with Dearborn and E. E. Lord (1925). My por-
tion of this monograph dealt with data that I collected on spontaneous mirror-
writing. Then and now this topic seems to me to be an interesting example
of the complexities of the development of perception, cognition, and human
receptor-directed motor skills in relation to probably inborn human lateral
dominance.
One of the influences of my graduate years was the opportunity to learn
about the new Gestalt psychology from Dearborn's able friend, R. M. Ogden
of Cornell. One day Dearborn handed me K. Koffka's The Growth of the
Mind ( 1924) in its first German edition, saying, "Read this and tell me what
it is about." Contrary to Dearborn's expressed doubts this book seemed to me
to be interesting and significant. Later it was my privilege to know Koffka
quite well and to enjoy at first hand his truly original mind.
The year before my Ph.D. was conferred I was offered an assistant pro-
fessorship of educational psychology at Cornell at, as I remember it, for the
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 35
time a very fine salary. I refused as I wanted to get my Ph.D. degree before
accepting a university appointment.
Two other graduate students and I took a seminar on animal behavior
given by a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Wallace Craig. His ethological point
of view ever since has been important in my thinking. He antedated in many
ways the present-day systematic position of men such as N. Tinbergen and
K. Lorenz, as they now fully acknowledge. The lack of recognition that
Harvard gave to Craig astonished me at that time and does so even more now.
He was far ahead of his time.
I think I received A grades, except for one A-minus, in all my graduate
courses at Harvard. As a result Dearborn proposed me for the coveted prize
of a Sheldon Fellowship. Sheldon Fellowships provide a stipend large enough
to allow each recipient to travel and study in a very free way for a year after
receiving the doctorate.
My father was pleased to learn that I had been awarded this fellowship
allowing me to travel and study for a year in Germany, and he again re-
minded me that he would be delighted to underwrite any additional needed
years in Germany to get an M.D.
All these plans were suddenly changed! H. S. Langfeld called me to his
office in Emerson Hall one day in the spring of 1924 and told me that he was
planning to accept an appointment at Princeton to be director of its psycho-
logical laboratory. I can still remember Langfeld's charming, smiling face as
he asked me to come to Princeton with him. He told me that each under-
graduate senior psychology major at Princeton had to dissect a human brain,
that he had found it a little hard to think of a graduate student in psychology
who was qualified to undertake the task of teaching physiological psychology
in this way, and he knew from his friends Dearborn and E. B. Holt that I
could do it. After a difficult debate with myself I relinquished the idea of
long study in Germany and instead accepted the Princeton offer.
Slowly I walked to the office of Dean Briggs who was in charge of
Sheldons to tell him my decision. He kindly suggested that I keep the fellow-
ship, go off to Germany at once, come back at the latest possible time, and
then, but not before, resign my fellowship. This generous administrative ac-
tion by one of America's greatest educators won my lifelong gratitude.
During my graduate student years a fellow student J. G. Beebe-Center
came to be one of my good friends, and in later years he was, I think, my
closest academic acquaintance. He was that rara avis in professional psy-
chology, a truly literate man. We not only studied neurology and optics to-
gether, but we also read and talked about the writings of such men as
Descartes, Hobbes, and Pascal.
During this period the psychological system of William McDougall in-
terested me as did his deep knowledge (which today is too often forgotten)
of the facts of behavior. His vitalism or near vitalism was always most unat-
 36 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tractive to me. At my oral doctoral examination were both G. H. Parker, a

most clear-minded and radical biological mechanist, and McDougall. I can
still remember Dearborn's helpful words to me as he led me into the exami-
nation room: "Say exactly what seems correct to you. We will agree with you
and not with McDougall."
My "The Report of a Sheldon Fellow" was published in the Harvard
Alumni Bulletin in 1925. I had elected first to go to the University of Berlin
where academic doors were pleasantly opened for me as a recent Harvard
Ph.D. by the head of the American Institute of the University of Berlin. This
Institute had been founded largely through the efforts of Harvard's great
Miinsterberg. Through the courtesy of Professor Wolfgang Kohler I was
privileged to attend lectures in psychology and also to observe research in
progress. I heard some of Kohler's lectures to his large and enthusiastic
classes. These lectures were models of organization and interest. Ever since
that time I have been a deep admirer of the greatness of Kohler's mind.
At Berlin I saw the elaborate apparatus developed by C. Stumpf for his
famous auditory studies. I was especially interested in the views of German
psychologists about the then novel Gestalt psychology. I went to meetings
of a small, admiring group who sat almost worshipfully around Max Wer-
theimer, a man who then and now seemed to me to have great originality and
insight.
Among the other psychologists that I met and talked to during this time
in Germany were H. Rupp, O. Bobertag, O. Klemm. F. Krueger, A. Kirsch-
man, T. Ziehen, G. E. Muller, N. Ach, and E. R. Jaensch. In England I met
Karl Pearson's associate, Miss Elderton, and had the pleasure of meeting for
the first time F. C. Bartlett of Cambridge, certainly one of the most gifted
trailblazers among the scientific psychologists of this generation.
On my return From my Sheldon Fellowship period I went at once to
Princeton where I began my life as a teacher and investigator. Princeton was
academically satisfying and delightful. My courses were physiological psy-
chology (including the dissection by each student of a real human brain)
and the history and systems of psychology. I assisted in graduate instruction
and in the supervision of some of the required senior theses of undergraduate
major students. Some of these experimental studies were later published.
Probably the most interesting part of my teaching was the conduct of small
preceptorial conferences. I had preceptorial sections of students from Lang-
feId's courses and from the course in social psychology given by H. C.
McComas. It should be noted that Langfeld in turn had preceptorial confer-
ences of students from my lecture courses. The exchange of ideas thus en-
gendered made this plan, fostered at Princeton by Woodrow Wilson, out-
standing as a method of instruction in higher education. I was honored while
at Princeton to receive mention in the annual student poll as one of the
university's best preceptors.
In 1924 the Princeton Department of Psychology occupied the entire
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 37

upper floor of historic Nassau Hall. But when I arrived Eno Hall, the fine
new laboratory of psychology, was nearly complete. As the youngest member
of the staff it was my obligation to supervise the movement of equipment
and apparatus from Nassau Hall to the new building. H. C. Warren had
generously contributed to the funds that made this building possible. Warren
was a rare man. He was an original, distinguished, and scholarly psychologist
and also the possessor of an inherited fortune that made it possible for him
to help psychology at Princeton in many ways. The word "gentleman" and
the word "Warren" are synonymous for me. Eno Hall was dedicated with a
fine address by E. B. Titchener, resplendent in his customary academic gown.
I came to Princeton with a planned research program. I intended to do
experimental work on the development and especially the embryology of
animal behavior in general and the growth of receptor-controlled behavior
in particular. I also planned to keep myself busy writing papers based on
library research on the history of physiological psychology and on topics re-
lated to the theory of receptor action and the role of primary sensory experi-
ence in mental life. Somewhere the great art critic Bernard Berenson says that
he counted each day lost in which he did not write something for publica-
tion. I must admit that from my Princeton days on, I have had this feeling,
but I must quickly add there have been many lost days.
I postponed the use of fetal mammals in experimentation and began
work on the behavior of larval amblystoma and frog tadpoles. Several papers
on the results secured by raising experimental groups of these animals under
an anesthetic were published. The anesthetic used allowed structural growth
but no movement. The drugged group was then compared with other groups
of similar organisms that had been allowed to move normally as they grew.
These studies supported a hereditary rather than an environ mentalistic theory
of the determination of the growth of organized behavior. At the time, the
results of these experiments surprised and almost shocked me. They did not
support my then strongly held belief in the determining influence of the
environment at every stage in the growth of behavior.
On the theoretical side my first paper was a long study of current atti-
tudes toward the definition and psychological meaning of the word "sensa-
tion." The problem analyzed in this paper grew out of thoughts started by
the treatment of this topic by Boring in his truly great two-year course at
Harvard dealing with sensation, feeling, imagery, thought, and related topics.
A few days after this paper appeared I was amazed and delighted to receive
a long letter from Titchener about it. He complimented me on the paper. He
commended me for having read everything that he CTitchener) had written.
He stated that it was a good thing for a young psychologist to become com-
pletely familiar with the works of one older psychologist. As he had chosen
Wundt, he said he was glad that I had chosen him.
At that time studies for a projected book on the history of research on
reflex action were begun. Two papers preliminary to the proposed volume
38 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

were published, one on Sir Charles Bell and one on Robert Whytt. The book
was never written. F. S. Fearing's volume, Reflex Action> appeared in 1930,
and I did not feel that two books on the subject were needed. However,
some interesting, close, and continuing academic friendships, such as those
with the neurologists C. J. Herrick and J. F. Fulton, developed from these
papers.
My frequent reference to the many contributions to psychology of Sir
Charles Bell amused my graduate students. Even now at the annual meeting
of the American Psychological Association, my former graduate students and
colleagues dine together calling themselves, much to the confusion of the
uninitiated, "The Sir Charles Bell Society."
An important event of my Princeton years was the invitation of Warren
to collaborate with him on a complete rewriting of his textbook on psychology.
Some of this work was done at Woods Hole, the great summer center of
American biology. Here I met and came to know many of the leaders of the
time in physiology, experimental embryology, and genetics.
Our book, Elements of Human Psychology (1930), when published by
Houghton Mifflin Company, proved to be an immediate success. It was used
as an introductory book for years in many major universities and smaller
colleges.
Warren and I both en joyed the formulation of crisp definitions for the
glossary of our textbook. This interest led me to help Warren with work on
his important Dictionary of Psychology (1934). After Warren's sudden death
I was able to assist in the preparation of the book for its publishers, also
Houghton Miffiin Company. I was by that time editorial advisor in psychology
for this firm. This publishing connection has continued throughout my whole
academic life and has given me great satisfaction. More than forty books
published by this distinguished company have been under my editorship.
Most have had interpretative introductions by me.
My associations have been most rewarding with the following authors
and indeed with many others: L. F. Shaffer, F. D. Brooks, N. L. Munn,
C. R. Rogers, N. R. F. Maier, M. A. Merrill, V. M. Axline, N. Cameron,
J. J. Gibson, W. C. Trow, Sir G. H. Thompson, A. Magaret, J. E. Horrocks,
G. G. Thompson, M. D. Glock, T. Gordon, J. M. Seidman, E. H. Porter,
D. Rogers, F. McKinney, R. S. Daniel, T. A. Ringness, H. J. Klausmeier,
A. J. Singer, Jr., E. J. Shoben, Jr., D. J. Levenson, E. B. Gallagher. I should
like especially to speak of my very close and friendly association through
the years with one of the authors listed above, Norman Munn. His great
textbooks, the outstanding Handbook of Psychological Research on the Rat,
the various editions of The Evolution and Growth of Human Behavior, and
his other books have in my view been real contributions to scientific psy-
chology and far more than what one sometimes hears called mere textbooks.
Association with my academic colleagues at Princeton was delightful. I
learned about psychological aesthetics from Langfeld. This subject has con-
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 39

tinued to interest me. I have been chairman of the Division on Aesthetics of

the American Psychological Association. I am also a member of the American
Society for Aesthetics. In art I like inventiveness and ingenuity in an
aesthetic world of strict rules. Pope is my favorite poet because of his psycho-
logical insight and his cleverness with words. J. S. Bach, his contemporary, is
my favorite composer. The baroque not only pleases my ears but my eyes,
and I especially like this style in painting, sculpture, architecture, and in the
work of ceramists and silversmiths. Lawlessness and romantic anarchy in the
arts leaves me cold. Most tested aesthetic rules are in a way absolutes and
have, it seems to me, a psychological and even a physiological base, as the
wise Bernard Berenson well observed.
In this connection I should perhaps note that I have always had a deep
bystander's interest in academic philosophy. Santayana has been a guiding
star in the establishment of my Weltanschauung. I also learned much at
Princeton by observing the truly urbane Langfeld as to how to live a wise,
reasonable, hardworking, intellectually rewarding, and at the same time pleas-
ant academic life.
My knowledge of intelligence testing and other forms of objective ex-
amining was increased by my associations with C. C. Brigham who was then
a Princeton professor but devoting much of his time to the development of
the Scholastic Aptitude Tests for the College Entrance Examination Board.
Later, as a result of my work in this area I was asked to take over the general
direction of this work for the College Entrance Examination Board on a full-
time basis, but this interesting offer was refused.
Undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton were then, as now,
highly selected and able. In my first year as a teacher I had a small senior
class of some five students. In this class were a number of men who later
became well known psychologists. These men who had notable later careers
included C. W. Bray, J. J. Gibson, the late Harold Schlosberg, and G. S.
Horton. It was later my privilege to assist each of them except Horton with
Ph.D. work.
For a number of years I taught educational psychology with great pleas-
ure at the Harvard summer school. These large classes were a delight. They
contained many visiting students from abroad. During one summer at Harvard
I also worked in physiology (with an emphasis on the techniques of neuro-
physiology) at the Harvard Medical School.
During the summers that I taught at Harvard, I learned to row a single
scull on the Charles River. All-in-all, these summers were most satisfactory. I
enjoyed my teaching, and yet there was time to get into shape for publication
the research of the previous winter. Incidentally, before this time for seven
summers I served as the chief counsellor at a summer camp for boys. I came
to know the state of Maine and especially its wilderness rivers very well dur-
ing this time. Here I acquired my continuing love of sport fishing.
At Princeton it was my privilege to live in the superb gothic Graduate
40 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

College. I learned there to know well the patrician Andrew Fleming West,
dean of the graduate school. West's philosophy of graduate education was
sound. He emphasized limiting such training to highly selected full-time
students with high marks in a broadly chosen basic undergraduate program.
During term time a few young faculty members and almost all the full-time
graduate students in all academic fields dined together in academic gowns
in the Great Hall of the Graduate College. Conversation here was good and
always stimulating.
While still an instructor at Princeton I was offered and I refused a full
professorship at Smith College by its famous president, William Allen Neil-
son. Possibly as a result of this offer I was made an assistant professor at
Princeton. Other institutions, including the Graduate School of Education at
Harvard, asked about my interest in moving from Princeton, but I always
replied in the negative.
In 1927 came an offer that I did accept from the able biologist A. D.
Mead, who was the vice president and active administrative head of Brown
University. He offered me a full professorship and the directorship of the
laboratory at Brown. He promised me a satisfactory laboratory budget and
large funds for fellowships for my graduate students. When I was trying to
make up my mind, President Hibben of Princeton offered me "permanent
tenure" if I would stay. When the decision to go was reached, I asked Mead
not to announce that I was a full professor in my first year. This was done
because of my age and possible faculty feeling at Brown. It was agreed that
the full professorial title should come to me in my second year. Even with
this delay I was a full professor in one of the old "Ivy League" universities
while I was still in my twenties. It has been said that I was the youngest or
one of the youngest full professors in the long history of Brown.
Brown was my academic home for nine of the most pleasant and produc-
tive years of my life. Providence is a city of historic charm, with a happy
mingling of "town and gown." At Brown I at once plunged into the organiza-
tion of a modern laboratory and the equipping of it for research and training
in experimental and animal psychology. I have always had a real interest in
apparatus and have published a number of papers in this field. From the first,
E. B. Delabarre, who had been at Brown since 1891, gave me full coopera-
tion in all aspects of my work. Delabarre's original scientific work should give
him an important place in the history of American psychology.
Soon after I came to Brown, the great depression overwhelmed America
and the world. The University budget and all faculty salaries were necessarily
cut, but Brown never reduced the stipends or the number of graduate fellow-
ships promised me when I came to the University. These fellowships became
widely known. Many very able university graduates all over the country
applied for them. Thus, Brown's small group of graduate students in psy-
chology soon became quite outstanding. The department took virtually no
part-time graduate students.
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 41

During my entire time at Brown I personally gave all the lectures in the
undergraduate elementary course. Soon those electing this course filled the
largest teaching auditorium, and in a few years it was necessary for me to
repeat the same lecture three times. The auditorium was filled from 9: 00-
10:00, 10:00-11 :00, and 11 :00-12:00. I also taught a number of advanced
undergraduate courses, conducted graduate seminars, and directed under-
graduate and graduate research. In spite of this heavy load of interesting
teaching Cat one time twenty-one hours a week) I found enough time for my
own research. I cannot resist noting that in my days at Princeton, Brown, and
Rochester, I alone or my wife and I together, and most of the teaching staff
went to the laboratories morning, afternoon, and evening, including weekends
except an occasional Saturday evening. In this way the graduate students and
staff became a hardworking family. The research of each member was of
interest to all.
At Brown for the 6.rst time I was able to begin in a serious way the pro-
gram of study of the prenatal development of behavior in mammals that I had
so long planned. The first research of this sort was a study of the fetal cat.
J. D. Coronios wrote his dissertation on this work. Following this investiga-
tion, other fetal mammals were studied. Some of these were done by me alone,
others in cooperation with colleagues and graduate students. For more than
two years I worked on the experiments basic to my long monograph on
stimulus-released behavior of the fetal guinea pig. In this study, 87 fetal
litters of known insemination age were prepared for study. Sixty of these
litters were in all respects adequate for research reports, and thus, the stimulus-
released behavior of a total of 178 fetuses was investigated in detail. Records
of the responses given by the organisms were made by a specially constructed
and electrically activated motion picture camera. As the organisms were stim-
ulated, I often wore a head-supported dissecting microscope. One hundred
and four points were established as important stimulus zones and all of these
points were stimulated in each organism and used at each fetal stage studied.
The stimuli were calibrated hair esthesiometers, needles, single break electric
shocks, and warm and cool drops of liquid. In relatively mature fetuses, rota-
tion and righting reactions were elicited by moving the total organism in
various planes. Protocols were dictated recording the responses of each fetus
to each stimulus. The novel results of this study appeared when these protocols
were later assembled in connection not with each fetus but with each stimulus
zone. Thus previously unrecognized and amazingly uniform behavioral se-
quences came to light. Specific patterns of behavior were typical of each zone
stimulated. This behavior was remarkably constant from fetal stage to fetal
stage. To use a modern term, here was displayed for the first time a whole
repertory of "species-specific responses" of a fetal mammal. These and related
studies led me to formulate what I have sometimes recently heard called
"Carmichael's Law." This is the generalization that most specific receptor
neuromuscular response mechanisms may be activated by experimental means
42 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

before the time in the normal development of the organism at which the
response in question must play its biologically essential role in the adaptive
behavior of the organism. Examples of such responses are rhythmic fetal
locomotor movements elicited by paw stimulation while the organism is still
in the amniotic Huid and chest movements basic to later air breathing that
can be called out by stimulation while the fetus is also still immersed in
liquid.
These experiments did demonstrate that speed of reaction increases and
what may be called "precision of behavior" became greater as fetal age in-
creased. But in general, in an analogy, one may say that the same pushbutton
elicits the same response to an amazing degree throughout much of active
fetal and early neonatal life.
I have discussed in several places the significance of these studies of the
fetal growth of mammalian responses for a general understanding of be-
havior. Here my old interest, which began as an undergraduate, in the
receptor control of behavior of a forced or tropistic sort took on a new dimen-
sion. In later fetuses, specific behavior acts were also seen in so-called spon-
taneous reactions that resulted from changes in the very important internal
environment of the organism or from metabolic or other activities of the
central nervous system itself.
While these experiments were in progress I wrote a chapter for the 1933
edition of C. Murchison's A Handbook of Child Psychology entitled "Origin
H
and Prenatal Growth of Behavior. This chapter, which has since been twice
revised, is longer than many separate books. It puts in historic and scientific
focus known facts about the growth of response before birth in all organisms
of which I could find satisfactory published reports. Only a relatively small
number of copies of this so-called "Murchison Handbook" were printed. This
led me to undertake the editing of my own .A1anual of Child Psychology. The
first edition of this new large volume appeared in 1946 and a second appeared
in 1954. This manual contained contributions by many distinguished psy-
chologists who have ever since been my friends and also contained revisions
of my own long article on the early development of behavior. The prepara-
tion of my two editions of this manual required thousands of hours of work,
but I believe that the labor was justified. My good and generous friend, the
late Professor Henri Pieron of the Sorbonne, saw fit to arrange to have the
book translated into French and published in 1952 in three volumes by the
Presses Universitaires de France. Pieron also made me an honorary member
of the French Psychological Society, and I think I can only say "had me
elected" as his successor as president of the Section of Experimental Psychol-
ogy and Animal Behavior of the International Union of Biological Sciences.
As this autobiography is written I still hold this office. The manual has also
been translated and published in full in Spanish.
At the invitation of E. C. Boring, H. S. Langfeld, and H. P. Weld, I
also wrote at this time "The Response Mechanism," which appears as chapter
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 43

two in their Psychology, A Factual Textbook published in 1935. I rewrote

this chapter for subsequent editions of this book. Later I wrote a chapter,
"Ontogenetic Development," in S. S. Stevens' Handbook of Experimental
Psychology.
During my Brown and Rochester years I had other research interests,
such as the postnatal growth of reflex capacity of kittens to right themselves
in the air when falling. Newborn kittens fall without giving any indication of
turning. By six weeks the well known air-righting rellex of the adult cat (i.e.
the falling cat always lands on all four legs) has practically come to a mature
state. The development of this capacity has, in my opinion, many general
implications for understanding the growth without learning of many other
adaptive responses in the ontogeny of mammals including man.
At my invitation H. H. Jasper was called to the Brown faculty. He had
taken his Ph.D. degree in psychology at Iowa and just before coming to
Brown had received the Sc.D. degree in physiology in Paris. In a conversa-
tion one day he remarked that a German scientist, Hans Berger of Jena, had
discovered that electrical potentials correlated with human brain activity could
be recorded by placing electrodes on the scalp and amplifying and recording
them. Some anatomical and physiological doubts occurred to me, but I did
borrow the German journals in which Berger had published his findings.
The results reported in these papers surprised me. Soon Jasper and I, work-
ing at Brown University's affiliated Bradley Hospital, assembled a new type
of high-gain amplifier and a Westinghouse mirror oscillograph system. I can
still remember our delight and amazement when, after appropriately applying
electrodes to the scalp (the subject was Carl Pfaffmann, now a distinguished
physiological psychologist), we secured an excellent and most typical record
of alpha waves. The results of this study were published in Science on J an-
uary 11, 1935. This joint article with Jasper is, I believe, the first report of
human electroencephalographic work on this continent. Following this initial
study Jasper and I and a number of other associates carried on a wide range
of psychological experiments in which electroencephalographic recording was
used. These included studies of the senses and of learning or conditioning.
Neuroembryology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology have been central
in my scientific interest from my student days to the present. Many of my
closest research friendships have been with workers in these fields, such as
C. E. Coghill, A. Forbes, H. Kluver, H. S. Gasser, and above all that amaz-
ingly original thinker and experimentalist, K. S. Lashley. It was Gasser who
suggested that I join the American Physiological Society, which has provided
me through the years with much information and many valuable professional
associations.
During my period at Brown and later at Rochester a number of studies
on brain mechanisms and behavior were carried out in which I participated.
Among those who worked in this field were K. U. Smith (now professor at
Wisconsin), J. L. Kennedy (now chairman of the Department of Psychology
44 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

at Princeton), W. E. Kappauf (now professor at Illinois), C. S. Bridgman

(now professor at Wisconsin), and L. C. Mead (now acting president of
Tufts). The central theme of these investigations was the role of the visual
cortex and of subcortical visual centers in various aspects of optically con-
trolled behavior in the cat.
Among my other students who took doctorates in this period were L. F.
Beck (now with the E. C. Brown Trust), R. Cruikshank (now Mrs. Bussy
and an authority on genetic development of animals), the late P. M. Fitts
(until his sad recent death, professor at l\1ichigan), A. C. Holfman (scientific
editor)' G. F. J. Lehner (director of the Psychological Clinic, U.C.L.A.),
C. T. Morgan (outstanding author and editor of psychological publications
and recently lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara), L. A.
Pennington (Division of Childhood and Youth, state of Wisconsin), E. T.
Raney (professor at Wayne University)' J. Warkentin (a psychiatrist who
holds both the Ph.D. and l\1.D. degrees), and N. Y. Wessel (the former
president of Tufts University). C. Pfaffmann, now vice president of the
Rockefeller University, Vias an undergraduate student in psychology at
Brown and did two years of graduate work in my department before becom-
ing a Rhodes scholar and taking his Ph.D. with E. D. Adrian at Cambridge.
All of these students without exception have made distinguished contributions
in teaching, research, or administration. It is interesting to note that most of
these students worked in quantitative animal psychology, which seems to
have turned out to be an especially good preparation for later eminence in
human factors work, engineering psychology, and also in administration.
Space keeps me from listing all of my students who took some graduate work
in my department during these years and then went on to further study
under other auspices. but I cannot resist mentioning in this connection
S. Bojar, J. D. Coronios, A. 1. Goldfarb, T. S. Krawiec, C. H. Pearce, S. O.
Roberts, 1\1. F. Smith, C. Riley, and D. Rugg.
At Brown some of my students and I worked on a number of studies of
learning including delayed response in the cat and what I consider to be a new
phenomenon in learning in which initial maze learning of a special type
modifies the subsequent capacity for such learning in the rat.
In 1930 I was invited to become a member of the psychology faculty at
Harvard. After carefully considering this flattering offer I decided to stay at
Providence. The position that was vacant at that time was then ably filled
by Gordon Allport who later asked me why I had the bad judgment to turn
down Harvard! Later I was queried about the possibility that I might be
offered the Chair of Psychology at Oxford, but I felt that I did not wish to
move to England.
In 1935 Professor E. G. Boring was on leave. At his invitation I became
a visiting professor at Harvard and taught the introductory courses in psy-
chology at Harvard and Radcliffe. During this period I commuted by auto-
mobile from Providence to Cambridge, often carrying with me lecture dem-
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 45

onstration material to be used in class, both in the large lecture room in

Emerson Hall and at Radcliffe. Thus, during the same single semester I
taught all the elementary psychology at Brown, Pembroke, Harvard, and Rad-
cliffe. Since my Brown lectures were each repeated three times, there were
days when I really felt familiar with the subject matter of elementary psy-
chologyl A small but pleasing reward was being chosen several times by
Brown University students as their "favorite professor."
In 1931 and 1932 I drove to Worcester once a week as a visiting pro-
fessor in experimental psychology at Clark University, carrying at the same
time my full program at Brown.
During the Brown years a number of other offers of positions came to
me. These included a full professorship at the University of Iowa, graciously
tendered me by the distinguished Dean C. E. Seashore, and one at Ohio State
University. Tempted as I sometimes was by these and other offers, it seemed
wise not to accept them.
The most important event of my Providence years was my marriage on
June 30, 1932, to Pearl L. Kidston of Hudson, Massachusetts. After finishing
college she had worked for a number of years at Harvard in the Graduate
School of Education. Beside her gay outlook on life, it may be mentioned
that she has an excellent applied mathematical mind. Her knowledge of sta-
tistics and accounting enabled her through the years to do the family book-
keeping-a great boon to me. She was the joint author of what seems to me
to be one of the best vocabulary tests ever constructed. In my early experi-
mental work she got up with me at any hour of the night or early morning
to go to the laboratory to take down in shorthand the long protocols that were
later basic in the studies of the early development of behavior. Later she has
had to share with me the transition from college teacher to college president
and then to the headship of one of our nation's greatest research institutions,
the Smithsonian. She says sometimes that our lives have at least not been
quiet or dull!
We have only one child, a daughter, Martha, born during my last year
at Brown; but this one child has brought us great satisfaction. She is now Mrs.
S. Parker Oliphant and has named our first grandchild Leonard Carmichael
Oliphant. She majored in zoology with a minor in psychology at Wellesley
and before her marriage became a quite proficient brain physiologist, his-
tologist, and an expert on the behavior of the squirrel monkey. Under the
fine guidance of her distinguished laboratory director at the National Insti-
tute of Health, Dr. Paul D. MacLean, she acquired special knowledge of the
limbic system.
In 1936 with great reluctance I left Brown to go to the University of
Rochester to become dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor
of psychology. The very able young president of Rochester, Alan Valentine,
offered to allow me to develop there in a new large building a fully adequate
experimental psychological laboratory for the type of physiological and be-
46 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

havioral experiments in which I was most interested. He also provided even

more adequate funds for graduate fellowships than I had had at Brown.
Before the days of federal funds for fellowships, this was most important.
Through the generous benefaction of George Eastman, founder of Eastman
Kodak Company, Rochester had, I believe, more endowment per student than
any other university in the United States.
My two years at Rochester, like the years at Providence and Princeton,
were very pleasant. Before coming to Rochester I had arranged with the
Brown authorities to transfer most of my graduate students from Providence
to Rochester. W. S. Hunter who came on my strongest recommendation to
assume my position at Providence, similarly brought his graduate students
from Clark to Brown.
The debt of gratitude that lowe to K. U. Smith for all that he did in
setting up the psychological laboratories at Brown and at the University of
Rochester should be attested here. I also wish to express deep gratitude
to Bertram Wellman, an able inventor and electronics engineer who, at
Rochester and later at Tufts, assisted me in invaluable ways in the invention,
construction, and use of the involved electronic apparatus which made pos-
sible many of my experiements. At Rochester, even though I was a dean as
well as a professor, I continued to teach all the elementary courses in psy-
chology at both the women's college and the men's college on their two sepa-
rate campuses. I also taught graduate courses and advised Ph.D. candidates
on thesis research.
One of the able graduate students at Rochester was A. C. Hoffman, II.
Contrary to the tradition of the laboratory, he insisted on doing a Ph.D. dis-
sertation in human, not mammalian psychology. Following a lead given us by
the distinguished Rochester physiologist W. O. Fenn, my electronics asso-
ciate and I had developed in our laboratory a device for the electrical recording
of the eye movements of animals. It occurred to me that it might be interest-
ing to compare quantitatively the use of this new electrical technique of
recording human eye movements with the old optical techniques that I had
used in my student years in the study of reading. These electrical techniques
were proved to be reliable, and they have the advantage that they can be
used with subjects sitting comfortably in a chair and without the head clamps
required in photographic studies.
During this Rochester period A. F. Rawdon-Smith, Wellman, and I col-
laborated on the study of the electrical cochlear response of the fetal guinea
pig. This study clearly showed the relationship between the development of
electrophysiological response of the auditory receptor organ and my pre-
viously determined time for the onset of behavior which could be released
by airborne auditory stimuli in this typical fetal mammal. Similarly, a number
of studies on compulsory optokinetic nystagmus in a number of different
mammals and in human babies demonstrated the usefulness of the electrical
eye movement recording technique in the study of many and quite various
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 47

visual phenomena. In this connection it may be pointed out that much of my

experimental work has involved the measurement of differences in the re-
lease of inborn rather than learned patterns of behavior by altering the phys-
ical stimuli acting on the organism.
In 1937 John A. Cousens, president of Tufts College, who had only a
few days before given me my first honorary D. Sc. degree, died. The presi-
dency was offered to me but it took many weeks before I could bring myself
to decide to leave the field of research and teaching and enter that of admin-
istering my alma mater. This was in 1938. The fact that the Tufts trustees
agreed that I be allowed to continue my personal scientific work helped me
decide, and I went to Medford. At Tufts I established a laboratory of sensory
physiology and psychology, of which I served as the director as long as I was
at the college.
Before going to Tufts I was offered a professorship and the chairmanship
of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. President
R. M. Hutchins promised to see that a proper new psychology laboratory was
built at Chicago if I would come, but I decided against the move.
During much of my academic life I have been active in psychological
and other scientific and academic organizations. I was treasurer of the Amer-
ican Psychological Association from 1932 to 1936. I was president of the
American Psychological Association in 1940. My presidential address was en-
titled "The Experimental Embryology of Mind" ( 1941). In this address I
presented the view that the experimental embryology of behavior provides a
basis for the understanding of some aspects of adult human behavior in a way
that is comparable with the explanatory role of a knowledge of embryology
in the study of adult anatomy. This address was a public retraction of what
I had come to see as the incorrect conclusions of some of my early publica-
tions in which I had interpreted experimental findings from too strongly an
environmentalist point of view.
In the years since this presidential address it has become even more clear
to me on the basis of my study of fetal and newborn animals, that genetically
determined maturation is of the utmost importance in understanding much
behavior at the adult level as well as in the early stages of human and animal
development. This conclusion seems to me to apply even in some ways to a
validation of properly stated nativistic theories of perception and some phases
of cognition. I cannot help feeling that the next half century will profitably
give more attention than has the preceding half century to a better under-
standing of what older workers called "the original nature of man." The word
"instinct" as applied to any aspect of human behavior may continue to be
suspect, but under some such name as "species-specific behavior" there can be
no doubt, it seems to me, that an increasing number of alterations in the
reactions of human individuals, during what may be called the full trajectory
of life, will be found on careful analysis to result from genetic coding. Such
coding must be considered in relation to the development of many individual
48 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

differences in function and capacity as well as in the behavior that is char-

acteristic of each species. To put this in a single phrase, it seems to me that
my studies suggest that much more human and mammalian behavior change,
even in adult life, is a result of genetic determination than has been thought
to be true in recent decades by some students of learning and especially by
some psychoanalytic theorists. In all my work involving the description of
behavior, whether external stimulus-released or so-called "spontaneous" in
nature, I have tried to say what the movements are that the organism makes
rather than calling behavior by such names as "epirneletic," "agonistic," "com-
fort-seeking," or other names for the ends secured by behavior as given by
modern zoologists such as J. P. Scott. The objective description of behavior
that I have always attempted to present is much more easily related to under-
lying neural and physiological mechanisms than is behavior named in terms
of the ends that the observer thinks the behavior he is observing will secure
for the animal.
During all of my fourteen years at Tufts, in spite of complicated adminis-
trative tasks, I succeeded in maintaining at least some free time for work in
my laboratory and for psychological writing and editing. Under a Carnegie
grant, Dearborn of Harvard and 1, with the cooperation of A. C. Hoffman
and L. C. Mead, the present Mrs. Jane Hildreth, Mrs. John L. Kennedy, and
others carried on an elaborate research of reading and visual fatigue using
the electrical recording method previously noted. This study demonstrated
that college and secondary school subjects could read continuously for six
hours either directly from books or from microfilm without any measurable
fatigue. The results of this study are reported in a full-length book, Reading
and Visual Fatigue (1947). This book also reviews the history of the scien-
tific study of eye movements.
During an early year of my work at Tufts I was able to accept from a
cherished friend, E. R. Guthrie, a visiting professorship at the University of
Washington for the summer term. I gave a series of lectures on the psychology
of learning.
In 1939 and 1940 the nation was clearly preparing for what turned out
to be inevitable war. At the suggestion of my lifelong patron and friend, the
great and inventive psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, I was asked to come to
Washington to direct the mobilization of scientists and engineers for the war
effort. This I agreed to do but not on a full-time basis. The title of my posi-
tion was Director of the National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Per-
sonnel. Before the war was over, my office grew to have a staff of over 400
persons and did, I think, invaluable work in the recruitment and assignment
of scientists for the atomic energy project, the radar project, and many others.
From 1939 to 1945 I commuted between Tufts in Massachusetts and Wash-
ington once or twice weekly, spending more than a year of nights on a sleep-
ing car between Boston and Washington. The human brain can stand a good
deal of shaking!
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 49
During the war years I also served as chairman of the Division of Anthro-
pology and Psychology of the National Research Council. This position gave
me an opportunity to work in many ways for the advancement of psychology
as a science and as a profession. For example, in the period just before the
war the United States had no psychological warfare program of importance.
I was asked to advise Army Intelligence on the setting up of work in this
field. I elicited the assistance of W. S. Hunter, and soon we were able to
bring E. R. Guthrie from the University of Washington to establish this
work. He and his associates did an outstanding job.
l\1y position at the National Research Council also allowed me to help
in the administration of the Emergency Committee, which did much for the
nation and for the psychological profession during the war. The National
Research Council had provided outstanding war service during the First
World War, but Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, and others quite rightly
decided that a new agency was needed for scientific work in the Second
World War. This led to the establishment of the National Defense Research
Committee and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development.
These new agencies were closely related to the National Research Council
and the National Academy. The history of this work, Scientists Against Time
by J. P. Baxter, summarizes the contributions of psychology. I played a minor
role in having psychology included in this organization and in nominating
W. S. Hunter to head this work. I served under Hunter's direction on war-
related research. The work that I was primarily concerned with was the
validation of synthetic training devices and the development of selection pro-
cedures.
During the war and immediately thereafter I was also a member of the
Science Committee of the National Resources Planning Board, the Com-
mittee on Research Personnel of the War Manpower Commission, and the
Committee on Human Resources of the Research and Development Board.
From 1947 to 1952 I was a member of the Naval Research Advisory Com-
mittee. I have had a similar post on the Army Scientific Advisory Panel. For a
number of years I lectured on human engineering before each new class at
the Naval War College in Newport. I have also given a number of special
lectures in various universities including the Arthur Dehon Little Lecture at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a series of lectures at the Rice
Institute in Texas. These latter lectures were published in 1956 as a book,
The l\1aking of Modern l\lind.
Through the years it has been my pleasure to have many honorary asso-
ciations with educational and related institutions. From 1947 to 1948 I was
chairman of the American Council on Education. I served for a number of
years as vice chairman of the Harvard Foundation for Advanced Study and
Research. I have also had the honor of serving as chairman or as a member
of visiting committees at Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Tulane, and
other institutions. I have been for more than a quarter of a century a member,
50 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

and for much of that time chairman, of the Board of Scientific Directors of
the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology. I am now also on a similar board
of the Delta Regional Primate Research Center at Tulane. For years I have
been on the Board of Scientific Overseers of the Jackson Memorial Labora-
tories at Bar Harbor where outstanding work on genetics in relation to mam-
malian behavior is conducted. My interest in the psychology of primates has
been active since my early graduate years, and I am proud at the present time
to be serving as president of the newly-formed International Primatological
Society.
From 1950 to 1954 I was chairman of a New England committee for a
comprehensive economic survey of the region. This project had the support
of the federal government and resulted in important publications by the Yale
University Press.
I now serve as trustee of the Brookings Institution, as a director of the
Research Corporation of New York, and from 1954 until a few months ago I
was president of the Board of Trustees of Science Service. From 1952 to its
termination (when it became the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis-
tration) I was a member of the board of the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, and from 1956 to 1958 I was "ice chairman of this truly great
research organization that did so much for the development of America's lead-
ership in aviation and also began, in such an eflective way, America's partici-
pation in the scientific conquest of space. Under an appointment of President
Eisenhower, I had the title of Ambassador Extraordinary and was chairman
of a delegation at an international conference at The Hague to represent our
country and ultimately to sign, in the presence of the Queen of the Nether-
lands, a treaty for the protection of cultural property in time of war.
In 1952 I was offered the secretaryship of the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington. I was very happy at Tufts where my efforts to improve the uni-
versity plant, especially at the medical and dental schools, had met with
success. I also had secured trustee agreement in increasing faculty salaries
each year and in giving more financial support for research. Some fourteen
million dollars of special gifts came to Tufts during my presidency. Thus,
after saying "no" for a number of weeks I was finally prevailed upon to ac-
cept the challenge of becoming the chief executive of the Smithsonian. I
still continue as a Tufts trustee, and I have thus watched with pleasure the
progress of the institution under the presidency of my former student and
good psychologist, N. Y. Wessell. I am grateful that Tufts has named its
largest new dormitory Carmichael Hall. A dynamic undergraduate social
service society also honored me by its name, the Leonard Carmichael Society.
I left Tufts and took up my new responsibilities in Washington on Jan-
uary 1, 1953. This move was in no sense a departure from the academic world.
The Smithsonian is a very great research institution, especially in astrophysics,
anthropology, archeology, ethnology, zoology, botany, geology, paleontology,
oceanography, and in general, social history. The research staff of the Smith-
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 51

sonian, in its areas of specialization, is as distinguished as the faculty of any

university in the world.
The Smithsonian has eleven bureaus most of which are primarily con-
cerned with research, but it also emphasizes museum work. In 1953 when I
came, there were some 37,000,000 catalogued objects in the Smithsonian
museums. When I retired in 1964 there were over 57,000,000 such objects.
The annual number of visitors during this period rose from 3,500,000 to
over 10,000,000.
One of the great privileges of serving as the principal administrative
officer of the Smithsonian was the opportunity of working closely and in-
timately with its Board of Regents, which included during my time official
Washington Chief Justices Fred M. Vinson and Earl Warren, Vice Presi-
dents Richard M. Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, Senators Clinton P. Ander-
son, Leverett Saltonstall, H. Alexander Smith, J. William Fulbright, and
Robert A. Taft, and members of the House of Representatives Clarence
Cannon, Frank T. Bow, M. J. Kirwan, J. M. Vorys, Overton Brooks, and
Leroy Johnson. "Citizen Regents" in this period included John Nicholas
Brown, William A. M. Burden, Robert V. Fleming, Crawford H. Greenwalt,
Caryl P. Haskins, Jerome C. Hunsaker, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush,
Owen J. Roberts, and Everette L. DeGoIyer. I feel deep friendship and ad-
miration for all of these men. I feel an especially personal debt of gratitude
to Clarence Cannon, parliamentarian, historian, and chairman of the House
Committee on Appropriations; Chief Justice Warren, chancellor of the Smith-
sonian during almost my whole tenure of office; and Robert V. Fleming,
chairman of the Institution's Executive Committee, who has one of the wisest
financial minds and is one of the greatest administrators I have ever known.
During the eleven years of my secretaryship, funds for buildings and the
planning of buildings appropriated by the congress amounted to over sixty-
one million dollars. The annual appropriations for the central units of the
Smithsonian rose from two and a half million to over thirteen million. In
this same dozen years over thirty-two million dollars came to the Institution
from foundations and other sources in addition to direct federal appropria-
tions.
My years in Washington have been most interesting. I have come to
know quite well each of the presidents and many ambassadors who served
here during this period. I have been, for some years, a vestryman of St. John's
Episcopal Church (the church of the presidents). I am also a member of the
Chapter (i.e., trustee) of the Washington National Cathedral. I am now a
trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It has been my great
privilege to come to know, besides government officials, many of the academic,
artistic, and literary leaders of this generation who have visited or worked in
Washington. I met nearly every major crowned head and many chiefs of
state who came to Washington during my Smithsonian years.
One of my most pleasant memories concerns the work I was allowed to
52 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

do personally in association with President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy for the
better preparation of the White House for visitors.
In 1964 at age sixty-five I insisted on retiring from the Smithsonian,
although I was repeatedly urged by the Board of Regents to continue my
tenure as secretary at least to age seventy. One of my last official acts at the
Smithsonian was to preside over the dedication of the great new thirty-six-
million-dollar Museum of History and Technology, which was conceived,
planned. and built during my administration as head of the Smithsonian. Presi-
dent Johnson and Chief Justice Warren spoke at these exercises. This is, I
believe, the largest and most adequate building ever built in the world for a
general museum.
To my surprise, on the announcement of my retirement I was offered
by the National Geographic Society's distinguished president and editor, Dr.
M. B. Grosvenor. my present position as vice president for Research and
Exploration of this great nonprofit society which has as its function "the in-
crease and diffusion of geographic knowledge" and which has done much
through the years for research in anthropology, archeology, human prehistory,
animal behavior, as well as in more specific geological and geographic fields.
I had been a trustee of the National Geographic for a number of years and
also for some time, chairman of its Committee for Research and Exploration.
My present position involves serving as chairman of the Society's able re-
search committee and the administration of grants for research to university
and other workers now totaling each year approximately one million dollars.
I have spoken of my long-time personal interest in primate research. Re-
cently I was privileged to observe troops of wild temperate-zone monkeys in
Japan, and I have also had the great opportunity of watching for some days
over thirty wild chimpanzees deep in the forests of East Africa.
I still continue my work as editor of books in psychology for the
Houghton Mifflin Company. In 1957 at the request of Random House I
wrote Basic Psychology, which gives my general point of view about psy-
chology and was written not as a textbook but as a volume for the educated
general reader. This book has surprised me by its wide and continuing sale
each year since its publication. During this period I have also written a num-
ber of articles and chapters for books dealing with psychological topics. A
1964 publication was a chapter, "The Early Growth of Language Capacity
in the Individual," in a book edited by E. H. Lenneberg, New Directions in
the Study of Language.
If I were asked what thread seems to me to have run most consistently
through my career, I could answer the question in one word: research. As
I have noted, I began a little investigation as an undergraduate at Tufts, and
ever since that time my own research, or the administration and funding of
the research of others, has been my central day-in and day-out interest.
During the last decade I have observed as many births and as many new-
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 53
born animals of different species as possible at the National Zoological Park,
which as a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution was under my general ad-
ministration. Also, with the help of a full-time research associate, Dr. Mozelle
B. Kraus, I have attempted during recent years to bring together, from all the
journals of the world, summaries of papers that deal with animal infancy. I
have undertaken this comprehensive study of early postnatal mammalian life
as a complement to my earlier studies of prenatal life. This recent work has
added to my conviction that many psychologists in the last half century have
given far too little weight to the role of inheritance in evaluating the changes
in behavior that take place as an individual develops. The recent growth of
knowledge concerning the role of DNA and RNA in the determination and
coding of genetic information provides a new basis for understanding the
role of inheritance in behavior change. I can now say that my lifetime of
study of receptor-initiated behavior, which I began as an undergraduate, has
given me each year a better and better understanding of the mechanisms of
adaptive response and of mental life.
It was suggested by the editors of this autobiography that as it is in-
tended, at least in part, for psychologists, it might be well to present some
reference to the individual writer's "feelings, personal motives, and aspira-
tions." I do not know how to do this, so the following description will have to
suffice. A Rorschach test was given to me some years ago and scored by one
of the great authorities in this field. The results of this test showed that I did
especially well in my ability to organize relations not commonly seen and in
grasping connections between elements. On the Z factor my total was 145.5,
which is among the highest scores that had been recorded. The range at
that time for the healthy superior was said to be 50-85. I am not quite sure
how to interpret this, but it is as close to a formal psychological analysis of my
personality as anything that I know of.
My life has not been all hard work. I have enjoyed the company of
friends in large and small groups. Club membership has meant much to me.
Among the clubs to which I have belonged with pleasure are the Art Club
(Providence), the St. Botolph and Country Clubs (Boston), the Cosmos,
Metropolitan, and Chevy Chase Clubs (Washington), and the Century As-
sociation (New York). I have also enjoyed membership in discussion clubs
such as the Pundits (Rochester, N. Y.), the Examiner (Boston), and the
Literary Society (Washington).
A number of honors have come to me during my career. I was elected
to the American Academy of Arts 'and Sciences in 1932 and to the American
Philosophical Society in 1942. I served as vice president of this society from
1962 to 1965. I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1943,
and I have been chairman of its section on psychology.
I have noted that I am a trustee of Tufts. I am also on the Board of
Trustees of George Washington University. I have recently been elected a
54 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Fellow of Brown University (that is, a member of its "upper house" of trus-
tees). Brown has also honored me by giving my name to the large auditorium
in the W. S. Hunter Psychological Laboratory there.
I may note also that I have received a number of special honors, includ-
ing a Presidential Citation given by President Truman for my war work and
one from President Eisenhower for my contribution to «the advancement of
man's knowledge of the science of £light and to the practical solution of many
attendant problems." On August 22, 1964, Mrs. J. F. Kennedy wrote me:
"President Kennedy was going to give you the Citation of Merit this last
Fourth of July in his beloved Rose Garden for all that you did for the Smith-
sonian in your glowing years there." As a reminder of this she honored me
by sending a beautiful gold box engraved in script as follows:

The
Seal of the President
of the United States

Leonard Carmichael
with deep appreciation for
January 20, 1961-November 22, 1963
Jacqueline Kennedy

I have also received the following foreign decorations: Commander of

the Order of Danneborg (kingdom of Denmark), Commander of the Order
of Merit of the Republic of Italy, Knight Commander's Cross with Star of the
Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Knight Commander
of the Order of Alfonso the Wise of Spain.
During my life in Washington and in connection with my many gov-
ernmental consulting positions I have always tried to explain what modern
psychology is to fellow physical scientists in places such as the Pentagon and
to many members of Congress at the almost endless hearings at which I
have testified. I cannot help believing that cumulatively I may have helped
a little in this way in developing a better understanding of the scientific field
of psychology in these great power centers of our national life.
I have received, in all, twenty-three honorary doctor's degrees including
an LL.D. from Harvard, which in its Latin citation uses these words:
"psychologiae studiosum qui non minus excellit in scientia sua quam in
rerum academicarum sagaci administratione:" This in English translation
reads, "A psychologist who combines distinction in his science with success
in administration." This phrase is surely too generous, but it does summarize
the two aspects of my life at which I have worked hard in the past and at
which I am now continuing to work as actively as is my habit. For me,
administration and psychology (and, a little paradoxically it may be, espe-
cially quantitative comparative animal psychology) are not separate fields.
Administration in many, many instances is real psychology applied in the
LEONARD CARMICHAEL 55
real world. Certainly for me, from my college days on, the scientific study of
the behavior of animals and men as an expression of the physiology of the
living organism has been a satisfying philosophers' stone which has given
meaning and coherence to all my thought and action.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Leonard Carmichael

An evaluation of current sensationism. Psychol. Rev., 1925,32, 192-215.

(with E. E. Lord and W. F. Dearborn) Special disabilities in learning to read
and write. Harvard Monogr. Educ., 1925, 1, IIO), 1-76
Heredity and environment: are they antithetical? J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1925,
20, 245-260.
The report of a Sheldon fellow (German psychological laboratories). Harvard
Alumni Bull., 1925, 27, 1087-1089.
The development of behavior in vertebrates experimentally removed from the in-
fluence of external stimulation. Psychol. Rev., 1926, 33, 51-58.
Sir Charles Bell: a contribution to the history of physiological psychology, Psychol.
Rev., 1926,33,188-217.
A further study of the development of behavior in vertebrates experimentally re-
moved from the iniluence of external stimulation. Psychol. Rev., 1927, 34, 34-
47.
The history of mirror drawing as a laboratory method. Pedag. Sem. J. genet.
Psychol., 1927, 34, 90-91.
Robert Whytt: a contribution to the history of physiological psychology. Psycho!.
Rev., 1927, 34,287-304.
A further experimental study of the development of behavior. Psychol. Rev., 1928,
35, 253-260.
(with H. C. Warren) Elements of human psychology. Boston: Houghton Miffiin,
1930.
(with H. P. Hogan and A. A. Walter) An experimental study of the effect of
language on the reproduction of visually perceived form. J. expo Psychol., 1932,
15,73-86.
Origin and prenatal growth of behavior. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A handbook of
child psychology. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univer. Press, 1933.
The genetic development of the kitten's capacity to right itself in the air when
falling. Pedag. Sem. ]. genet. Psychol., 1934, 44, 453-458.
(with E. T. Raney) Localizing responses to tactual stimuli in the fetal rat in re-
lation to the psychological problem of space perception. Pedag. Sem. J. genet.
Psychol., 1934,45, 3-21.
An experimental study in the prenatal guinea pig of the origin and development
of reflexes and patterns of behavior in relation to the stimulation of specific
receptor areas during the period of active fetal life. Genet. Psychol. Monogr.,
1934, 16, 337-491.
The response mechanism. In E. C. Boring, H. S. Langfeld. and H. P. Weld
(Eds.), Psychology, a factual textbook. New York: Wiley, 1935.
56 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(with H. H. Jasper) Electrical potentials from the intact human brain. Science,
1935,89,51-53.
A re-evaluation of the concepts of maturation and learning as applied to the early
development of behavior. Psychol. Rev., 1936, 43, 450-470.
(with G. F. J. Lehner) The development of temperature sensitivity. J. genet.
Psychol., 1937, 50,217-227.
(with H. H. Jasper and C. S. Bridgman) An ontogenetic study of cerebral elec-
trical potentials in the guinea pig. J. expo Psychol., 1937, 21, 63-71.
(with Z. Y. Kuo) A technique for the motion-picture recording of the develop-
ment of behavior in the chick embryo. J. Psyc1wl., 1937, 4, 343-348.
Learning which modifies an animal's subsequent capacity for learning. ]. genet.
PSyc1lOl., 1938, 52,159-163.
(with A. F. Rawdon-Smith and B. \Vellman) Electrical responses from the cochlea
of the fetal guinea pig. J. expo Psychol., 1938, 23, 531-535.
(with A. C. Hoffman and B. Wellman) A quantitative comparison of the elec-
trical and photographic techniques of eye movement recording. J. expo Psychol.,
1939, 24, 40-53.
(with J. Warkentin') A study of the development of the air-righting reflex in cats
and rabbits. ]. genet. Psychol., 1939, 55,67-80.
The national roster of scientific and specialized personnel. Science, 1940, 92,
135-137.
The experimental embryology of mind. Psychol. Bull., 1941, 38, 1-28.
(with J. G. Beebe-Center and L. C. Mead) Daylight training of pilots for night
flying. Aeronaut. Engng. Rel'., 1944,3, 1-10.
(Ed.) Manual of child psychology. New York: Wiley, 1946.
(with \\7. F. Dearborn) Reading and 'visual fatigue. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1947.
Ontogenetic development. In S. S. Stevens (Ed.), Handhook of experimental psy-
chology. Ne\v York: Wiley, 1951.
The phylogenetic development of behavior patterns. Genetics and the inheritance
of integrated neurological and psychiatric patterns (Proceedings of the Associa-
tion for Research in Nervous and l\lental Disease). Baltimore: Williams and
Wilkins, 1954, 87-97.
The making of modern mind (The Rockwell Lectures presented at Rice Institute,
March, 1955). Houston, Texas: Elsevier, 1956.
Basic psychology. New York: Random House, 1957.
Evidence from the prenatal and early postnatal behavior of organisms concerning
the concept of local sign. Acta Psychol., 1961, 19, 166-170.
The early growth of language capacity in the individual. In E. H. Lenneberg
(Ed.), New directions in the study of language. Cambridge: M.LT., 1964.

Other Puhlications Cited

Baxter, J. P. Scientists against time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946.

Koffka, K. The growth of the mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1924.
Preyer. Specielle Physiologie des Embryo. Untersuchungen iiher die Lebenser-
scheinungen vor der Geburt. Leipsig: Grieben, 1885.
Warren, H. C. Dictionary of psychology. Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1934.
57
Karl M. Dallenbach
I am a descendant of a German-Swiss family. My surname, which is
alternative with "Tallenbach," which means "valley brook," is almost as fre-
quently seen and heard in Canton Berne as "Smith" in America. The name
has been traced back to the thirteenth century, to the national hero of Switzer-
land, Wilhelm Tell (Tall, Taellen ), who, according to family legend, was
the founder of the family. Since the interchange of "T" and "D," which comes
from Hatting, is one of the commonest of Grimm's etymological laws, the story
is not incredible, as it speaks of the "Tells" who lived by the "brook." It is
a nice legend, whether true or not.
The Iirst member of the family to migrate to America was Jorg Martin
Dallenbach. He was one of the "poor" Palatines brought by the English
Queen Anne to the Hudson Valley in 1710 to manufacture naval stores for
the British Navy. After serving in the Colonial Army (1711) in the war
against the French in Canada and working out his indebtedness to the
Crown for his passage to and subsistence while in the Hudson Valley, he
received a patent of land near Stone Arabia in the Mohawk Valley of New
York, where he remained the balance of his life. Many of his descendants
still reside there but under several variants of his surname which range from
Dellenback, Dellenbeck, Dallenbaugh, Tillapach, to Tillapaugh CDillenback
& Dallenbach, 1935, p. xv).
The second migration of Dallenbachs to America occurred in 1824 when
two brothers, Christian and Jacob, both of middle age, heads of families, and
men of moderate means, left Nidenberg and Safneran, neighboring villages
near Lake Bierma, for the New World. Christian, the elder, a cheese maker,
settled on dairyland near North Ceorgetown, Ohio; Jacob, the founder of my
twig of the family, a vintner, settled on land more suited for vineyards, a
farm on the north bank of the Allegheny River. now in the center of Pitts-
burgh, North Side, but then on the outskirts of Allegheny City.
The two families prospered in America. Christian's family, which settled
in a predominately English-speaking community, soon adopted the Anglicized
spelling and pronunciation of their surname as "Dellenbaugh." Jacob and
his family, who lived in the German community in Allegheny City, were
59
 60 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

more resistant. The most that any of them yielded in the spelling of their
surname was to change it to "Dellenbach." Jacob and his son John, my grand-
father, persisted in using the Swiss spelling, Dallenbach, throughout their
lives.
1\1y grandfather worked for his father until he married Rosanna Angler,
a recent immigrant from Arlenbach, Switzerland, in March, 1848. He then
struck out to seek his own fortune, settling first at Ripley, Ohio, which had
the promise of developing into a metropolis. He opened a market and general
store and remained there for eight years, during which his first four children
were born; among them was my father, John Jacob, the third child and first
son, who was born on June 7, 1853 (Dillenback & Dallenbach, 1935, P: 360).
Ripley was, however, by-passed for Cincinnati in the competition for river
traffic. Its promise to become an important river port was not fulfilled. That,
connected with the death of their fourth child, decided my grandparents to go
farther west. My grandfather wished to go to the gold fields of California,
but my grandmother, as small a woman as he was a large man-he was over
6 feet in height and 250 pounds in weight-would not hear of it. As she ruled
the family, they compromised by taking a covered wagon to a homestead in
Champaign County, Illinois. The land was all that it was claimed to be;
it grew crops, but was so far from a market that there was little that could
be done with them after they were harvested, particularly when corn was
9 cents a bushel and other produce correspondingly low.
While still solvent, my grandfather gave up the profitless struggle on the
soil and moved to a little settlement that sprang up several miles to the west
of Urbana, Illinois, with the laying of the tracks of the Illinois Central Rail-
road. He established a market there and engaged in the profitable business of
shipping livestock on the new railroad to the Chicago market. The little vil-
lage, first called West Urbana and then officially Champaign, flourished and
with it John's fortune and family. Six children-five sons and one daughter-
were born here, making ten children in all, but two died before reaching
maturity. When John retired in 1877, he turned his market and wholesale
livestock business over to his two older sons, my father, John Jacob,
and my uncle, William Christian, who conducted it successfully until they
retired after forty years, in 1917, without anyone in the family to succeed
them.
My maternal grandparents, Christian Franz Philipp and Johanna
(Schnieber) Mittendorf, and their three daughters immigrated to America
from Wolfenbiittel, Braunschweig, Germany, in the spring of 1853. They
first settled in Leiden, Cook County, Illinois, where my mother, Anna Caro-
line Mittendorf, was born on July 6, 1854. After one year in Leiden, the
family moved to a farm outside the village of Champaign. My father, John
Jacob, and mother, Anna Caroline Mittendorf, were married in Champaign,
November 17, 1880.
KARL M. DALLENBACH 61

CHILDHOOD

I, the second of three sons of this union, was born October 20, 1887. Since
the first-born was a boy, it was hoped I would be a girl. That I was not made
little difference in my early rearing. My hair, naturally wavy, was allowed
to grow until long, blond curls hung far down my shoulders and back, and
I was dressed in skirts until I was nearly four years old. Then I was put in
knee-pants and allowed to go barefooted in clement weather, as all boys were
in those days. I retained my long hair, however, and was subjected to a fate
worse than dresses; namely, a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" suit, a dark velvet
sailor-jacket and knee-pants, worn with a Buffy white shirt with a large
collar and cuffs and a large white bow tie, patent leather shoes, and knee
stockings. This was the garb of the "hero" of Frances Hodgson Burnett's book
(Little Lord Fauntleroy), who, both in clothes and character, represented
a boy many proud mothers throughout the English-speaking world wished
their sons to be. I wore this suit to Sunday School and on every occasion
when my mother wished to exhibit me, which was much too frequent for
me.
As long as I wore dresses, my play was restricted to girls. The boys did
not welcome me. When I was put into knee-pants, however, I ventured afield
and enlarged my circle of acquaintances. I found the boys, of whom there
were many in the immediate neighborhood, different kinds of playmates.
They played rougher games and would not give in to my wishes and sug-
gestions and would use force to have their own way. I was at a great dis-
advantage with long hair and was at the bottom of the pecking line. Nearly
every time I ventured to play with the boys, I came running home, crying
and bedraggled, for the sympathy that I would get from my mother. One
day, Dad chanced to be home when I returned. I got no sympathy from him.
He told me if I ever started a fight he would give me a licking when I re-
turned home, as he did not wish a "bully" for a son; and further, if I got
licked in a fight I did not start that he would give me another licking when I
got home, as he did not wish a "sissy" for a son. As I knew that he would
keep his promises and also, from experience, what his lickings were, I had
to keep the peace and avoid disputes; I had in short to be a "sissy."
I decided, however, that my hair, my handicap in fighting, must go.
I begged to have it cut, but to no, avail; Mother would not hear of it. My hair
was her pride and joy. I persisted in my requests, but it was not until I
announced that I would not go to school with long hair that my mother
finally acquiesced. The visit to the barbershop was, however, delayed until
the day before the opening of school, and then, when I left with Dad to
have it done, Mother began to cry. To my everlasting satisfaction, I ran back,
embraced her and said that I would not have my hair cut if she did not
62 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wish it. At her "No, go ahead, but bring your curls back," I turned and ran
after Dad before she could change her mind. Soon I was an emancipated and
happy boy. Fifty years later, when Mother died, the box marked "Karl's curls"
was found among her treasures.
Freed from the handicap of long hair, I soon changed my position in the
pecking order of the neighborhood. With only a few fights I advanced myself
from the bottom to the top. My first fight was with a boy a year older but
smaller than I, as I was large for my age. It arose over the distribution of the
insects that he and I were jointly collecting. He wished, as I thought, to take
the best specimens for his own. I objected. he insisted and, as he had been
accustomed to pushing me around, he attempted to make me accept his
division by force. He did not realize what a difference my lack of curls would
make and got himself thoroughly licked. He never challenged me again and
neither did any of the boys who stood below him in the pecking order.
My next fight, or rather series of fights, was with a playmate who stood
at or near the top of the pecking order. He also was a year older, and smaller,
than 1. He taught me to play marbles, at which he defeated me badly at
first. Chagrined by my lack of skill, I practiced at home until I became more
proficient than he was, and by the time my curls were cut, I was defeating
him regularly. Since he had consistently won before, he could not under-
stand the change and sought to make me play over my good shots by accus-
ing me of "shoving," which was not allowed. As I was not shoving, I refused
to replay the shots and the game ended in a fight in which he found himself,
to his surprise, soundly thrashed. As childhood quarrels are short-lived, we
were soon back on the old basis playing marbles again. He consistently lost
as I continued my practice and increased my skill. The games almost in-
evitably ended in fights, because he never gave up. I could not understand
his persistency and wished he would stop, for I counted him a friend and
disliked to hurt him. Our fights continued, however, until he moved away
with his family to another city. Some fifty years later, when we were in
Champaign on a visit, he told me why he persisted in fighting me. He knew
that he was a year older than I, that he had once been able-when I had
long hair-to lick me, and he thought he would be able to do it again if he
tried often enough. He showed admirable courage and persistency, but a woe-
fullack of judgment and the realization that conditions sometimes irrevocably
change.
When I was about four years old, and my younger brother was about
two years old, our home, a cottage which was too small for the growing
family, was moved to the outskirts of town where we lived while a new
home, a large two-story, twelve-room house possessing all the modern con-
veniences of that day and generation, was being built on the old lot. Besides
a large cellar with furnace, coal, laundry, and tool rooms, it had a large attic
that was finished for our play. It was equipped with blackboards and, in due
time, with a wrestling mat on which my older brother taught me the art of
KARL M. DALLENBACH 63

wrestling, popular around the turn of the century. Though six years older
than I, and by then an athlete in high school, he brought me to the level
of achievement at which he could not pin my shoulders to the mat.
After we moved into the new home, particularly after my curls were cut,
the center of play of the boys in the neighborhood shifted to our yard and
house, not only because of the large playroom in the attic that our friends
enjoyed with us in inclement weather, but also because of the many play-
things we had at our house.
When our play took my younger brother and me away from home,
Mother called us by ringing a farm-bell, but Dad, if he were at home,
whistled for us. He used a shrill whistle that came down through the family
from Switzerland. It is made with a crooked little finger and can be heard
across a section, i.e. over a mile, as I determined in an experiment that I in-
duced Dad to make with me. A peculiarity about that whistle is that only
one member of a generation of the family learned it, and that it descended
down my line. My grandfather acquired it from his father, Dad from his,
and I from mine. None of my uncles nor either of my brothers learned it;
of my family, only one, John Wallace, my older son, learned it.

EARLY MEMORIES

Meeting of Brothers. My earliest and most vivid memory during child-

hood occurred on September 13, 1889, when I was twenty-two months and
twenty-three days old. It was my introduction to my newly arrived baby
brother.
I had spent the previous afternoon and night at the home of two cousins
who were about my age and was taken by my aunt to see my brother the
next day. All the aunts from both sides of my house were assembled in our
living room to observe my reactions. I was led to my crib. I do not know what
I expected to see, but what I saw, a little red face occupying my place, en-
raged me. Since my little arms would not reach him, and I could not pull
him out, I went to the coal scuttle standing beside the baseburner which
heated the room and got the poker to drive him out. It was taken away from
me before I could wield it. Then I got the coal shovel, of which I was also
relieved, and then the broom and mop from the kitchen pantry, which were
also in turn taken away from me. Then, giving up the attempt to drive away
the usurper, as everyone seemed against me, I ran out to the back porch and
threw myself down on the back steps and bawled. My crib and my place
in my mother's affections-since I did not see her in the room-were lost!
My aunt, who brought me there, came out and comforted me and took me
home with her, where I spent the next two days. Though I was fond of her,
she was not Mother, hence when asked if I wished to return home for a visit,
I gladly assented. When I got home and found that I had not lost Mother's
affections and that I had a new trundle-bed in place of the crib, that I was a
64 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

big boy and not a baby, I readily agreed, when Mother invited me, to stay
home.
In the psychological sense of "an event that is placed, dated, and re-
called with the feeling of familiarity," this is a memory. But is it? This event,
"the meeting of brothers," was related so often during my childhood and
youth that what I now recall may be nothing more than a composite of the
stories told me. Had it never been mentioned after its occurrence, it would
not, I believe, be "remembered" now.
Frozen Tongue. One cold winter day, while playing in the snow (l was
still wearing skirts, hence it must have been some time early in my fourth
year), I sought to slake my thirst by licking an icicle. At contact, my tongue
stuck (froze) fast, and I reflexly pulled it free, losing the skin from its
center.
I had a very sore tongue for some time, and when it healed I discovered
that I could not taste candy at the center, only around the edges and far
back, as my experiments with stick candy revealed. I thought my inability to
taste at that area was due to the loss of the skin from there. It was not until
many years later, when I studied psychology, that I learned the 'real reason:
that the center was insensitive to taste. This "early memory" may be like
"the meeting of brothers," since everyone in my family knew and talked
about it for many years and warned the children in the neighborhood against
duplicating my experience. It may well be, therefore, that what I "remember"
now are the stories told of it and not the original experience.
Running Away from Home. The third "early memory" occurred during
the spring of my fourth year, while I was still wearing dresses.
After being punished by my mother for not minding her, I announced
in anger that I was going to run away. I thought she would beg me to stay,
but she wisely did not. I regretted the threat almost as soon as it was made,
but having delivered it, I had to go through with it. I dallied around as long
as I could to give her opportunity to plead with me to stay home, getting first
a wrap and then going to the cooky jar for food to take with me on the trip,
and then I walked resolutely out of the front door and down the street. The
problems that I faced on that trip were tremendous. I did not know where to
"run," but habit settled that, and I turned down the familiar street that led to
Grandfather Mittendorf s, a mile out of town. I trudged along slowly; deeply
regretting that I had got myself into such a situation and fully aware that it
was of my own making.
When I reached the edge of town and the long country road stretched
out before me, I sat down on the bank to rest and to consider my problems-
and to eat the cookies I had brought with me. Where was I to sleep that
night and the nights thereafter? What and where would I eat? It was a
dark and dismal world that faced me. Suddenly, the happy thought occurred
to me that I had run away; that having been accomplished, I was now free
to return. I happily retraced my steps homeward and when I got there I
KARL M. DALLENBACH 65

rushed through the door with the happy cry, "I'm back!" Mother said, "Good,
just in time for supper." Not another word was ever said about the incident.
It was evidently to be a secret between Mother and me. She never mentioned
it; she did not even ask me where I had gone. I was grateful that it was to be
ignored, and I hoped it would be forgotten, but I myself never was able to
achieve that.
Here is an "early memory" that was not discussed, but was recalled and
revived frequently by me to keep me from ever again thinking about running
away from home; a thought which G. Stanley Hall claims is very frequent in
youth.

EDUCATION

Grammar School. During the summer before I entered school, the

eight-grade schoolhouse, which I was to have attended. burned to the ground.
The makeshift necessitated by this fire placed the first grade in the Baptist
Church across the alley back of my home. As I could count, recite the alpha-
bet, and read a few simple words, I found the first grade, except for the
play with children of my own age, tedious and boring.
Grammar schools at that time were organized into grades of about forty
pupils each, every grade being divided into an A- and B-class upon the basis
of the teacher's opinion of the pupils' competency. Except for the prestige of
being in the A-class, it made little difference into which class one was placed,
as both used the same books and studied the same subjects. The teacher
taught the A-class while the B-class was studying and then the B-class while
the A-class was studying. There was no surcease from labor for the teacher;
she alternated between the classes throughout the day except during the
fifteen-minute recess held every morning and afternoon, and the periods de-
voted to singing and drawing, when the classes were combined. Of the eight
grades through which I passed, two, the second and seventh, stand out in
memory.
The second grade was in the new brick schoolhouse built on the site of
the one that had burned. I remember it in particular because the teacher
made arithmetic "fun," it became a contest in which I determined to and did
excel. and also because she read to the combined classes in the last period of
every week if we had been "good children" during the preceding days. She
read the most fascinating stories that I had ever heard: those of "The Gods
and Heroes of Greece and Rome." We were entranced and every pupil was
not onlv a monitor of his own behavior but of everv other child's; it was the
best-behaved class I ever attended. '
When she finished this book, we insisted upon her rereading it rather
than turning to another, hence we heard those tales over and over, the
teacher finally permitting us to call for the ones we desired. Twice-told tales
do not bore children; indeed, they wish to hear stories that they know so
66 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

well that they can correct the narrator when he deviates from them. I called
for the "labors of Hercules" and for the stories of Prometheus and Epimetheus.
What I know about the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome, which is, I
think, considerably more than the average person, was learned in this grade.
It was while listening to these tales that I gained insight into my character.
I wished very much that I could identify myself with Hercules or Prometheus
(whose name, as we were told, meant "forethought"), but truth and honesty
forced me to the realization that I was an Epimetheus, an "afterthought." I
tried very hard to change my character to that of a "forethought," but with-
out success.
I was mischievous, a "Peck's bad boy," in the grades following the
second. There were no rewards for being good, such as those offered to the
children in the second grade, hence I behaved naturally. My reputation for
misbehaving, which had been building up ever since I left the second grade
and had reached its climax in the sixth grade, preceded me to the seventh,
the teacher of which was prepared to "break that frisky colt."
The first day in class I met a new boy whose family had just moved into
the city. He \\'as put in the B-class in a seat next to me. We soon became fast
friends and fellow connivers in mischief: the teacher now had two "colts"
to break. She set about it with a will; she paddled the palms of our hands
with a ruler and whipped us with switches. Our code of manhood would
not permit us to cry, and we did not, though we both realized that the pun-
ishment would be less severe if we did. Lickings followed lickings with no
apparent effect, hence she tried a different attack; she expelled us from school
for a week, requiring us to take our books with us. She did not inform our
parents, and since we hid our books and left and returned home every day
at the usual time, they never learned of it. Except for the constant fear that
they would, we had a pleasant vacation. We were, however, glad when the
time passed and we could again return to schooL
I went back to myoId seat but my accomplice was placed two seats
in front of me. Undaunted by the separation, I stuck a pin through the tip
of my shoe, extended my leg, and stuck him in the hip while the teacher
was busy with the A-class. He screamed. Without asking for an explanation,
the teacher told us to stay after school. This on the first day after we had
returned from our expulsion! When we reported to her after school, she told
us to take seats in front of her desk and went about her other duties, per-
mitting us to stew in the juices of our imagination. Finally she turned to us
and said, "Boys, I do not know what to do with you; punishment and expul-
sion have accomplished little. I believe that you are bad because you do not
have enough to do. I am therefore giving you more to do. Tomorrow morning
I shall promote you to the A-class. If you do not keep up with the work
there, back to the B-class you will go." Carrying my books across the room
to the A-class the next morning was the proudest moment of my life. To
avoid the disgrace of being demoted, which hung heavily over me, I resolved
KARL M. DALLENBACH 67

to be an exemplary pupil, and my companion in "crime" felt the same as 1.

In this we were aided by the teacher, who removed temptation by placing
us in seats widely separated. The entire course of my life was, I believe,
changed. From an indifferent pupil, satisfied merely with a passing grade, I
strove thereafter to be at or near the head of my class.

CULTURAL TRAINING

Mother was determined that her boys should be cultured as well as

educated. She insisted that we receive religious and musical training and
permitted us to be exposed to the theater.
Religious. Mother was an ardent member of the Congregational Church,
and I was sent to the primary class in its Sunday School at an early age. I do
not remember attending in girls' dresses but do recall being there in the
"Lord Fauntleroy" suit, hence I must have entered sometime around my
fourth birthday. I enjoyed Sunday School and attended it regularly until I
was old enough to accompany Mother to church, where I served as an usher
until I left home for graduate study.
Musical. Sometime during my eighth year, my brothers and I were sub-
jected to piano lessons. I demurred, but to no avail. Perhaps because of my
mechanical ability, I rapidly learned to read and to play music, and soon I
was playing in my teacher's recitals. Though I preferred popular music, I was
forced to play classical, specializing in Liszt and Chopin. At the recitals, I
pounded out the pieces my teacher selected for me, while Mother sat en-
tranced, planning, as I discovered later, to make a concert pianist out of me.
Mother played the guitar. Her instrument stood in the corner of the
music room and once in a while she would play it for us and sing the old-
time songs. Once, in an unguarded moment, I expressed the wish that I could
play it and found that she had engaged a teacher for me. I quickly learned
the chords of the various keys and to read and play music written for the
guitar, but I could not play any compositions, on piano or guitar, without
the music before me, unless I had practiced the piece and had learned to
play it "by heart." I simply lacked an ear for music. My piano teacher recog-
nized this and told Mother that I had progressed with her as far as I pos-
sibly could. Thus, after six long years, my musical training was ended. I have
ever since, however, been grateful to Mother for her persistence for I did
acquire an appreciation for and a knowledge of music that I otherwise would
have lacked.
Theatrical. Shortly before the conclusion of my musical training I was
offered a position as an usher at the local opera house. As it was the only
theater in the community and was well attended by the people of the two
towns, Champaign and Urbana, and by the students of the University, the
best of the Chicago plays and operas came to it. The position carried no
salary, only the privilege of seeing the productions. It was with trepidation
68 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

that I asked Mother whether I could accept. To my delight, she gave her
consent because she agreed it would be a cultural experience-a point I had
emphasized in making my request. I saw several hundred productions-
good, bad, and indifferent-during my years of service. I never, however, be-
came stage struck; at no time did I become attracted to a career in the theater.

GOALS

While Mother was planning a musical career for me, I was planning
careers of my own. Indeed, throughout my life, as far back as I can recall,
I had a goal in mind.
Fireman. My first ambition was to be a fireman. We lived close to the fire-
station. Whenever the fire-bell rang, signaling the district of the fire, my
playmates and I ran or rode our bicycles to it. What an exciting life the fire-
man had. Dad, moreover, had served as a volunteer fireman when young.
What he had been, I also wished to be.
Policeman. I did not go to many fires before I noticed there was always
a man in a blue coat, a roundish helmet, with a club in his belt, who ordered
everybody around, keeping the best place from which to view the fire for
himself. When I learned that he was a policeman and that he could arrest
and put people in jail, I decided not to settle for less; I would become a police-
man.
Lawyer. One day I overheard my father address a man as "squire." As
that title was new to me, I asked, "What's a squire?" To his reply, "a lawyer,"
I again asked "What's a lawyer?" To end my questions, he said, "A man who
gets a dollar every time he opens his mouth to speak a word." Upon hearing
that, I immediately decided to be a lawyer, and from that moment until I was
well along in graduate school, my goal was the law.

EARLY MANHOOD

HIGH SCHOOL

I could do nothing in grammar school toward shaping my career for law

and only a little in high school, but what could be done was done. I registered
in high school for the academic course.
Academic. During the first semester of my freshman year, after dropping
my musical training, I found free time on my hands and my Epimetheusian
characteristics were again coming to the front. To submerge them, I elected
an additional course every semester and was graduated with enough addi-
tional units to secure fifteen credit-hours at the University of Illinois-a div-
idend that I had not anticipated.
I enjoyed and did well in mathematics (algebra and all the geometries-
KARL M. DALLENBACH 69
plane, solid, spherical, and analytical), in science (chemistry, physics, and
physiology), geography, history (American, English. Greek and Roman,
Medieval, and modern), drawing (freehand and mechanical), and manual
training-the meaty subjects, those in which one could set his teeth; and
relatively poorly in English, German, Latin, poetry, public speaking, composi-
tion, and rhetoric-the less factual literary subjects, but the very ones in
which a lawyer should excel. To supplement these courses, I joined the debat-
ing and literary societies and competed in every oratorical and declamatory
contest for which I was eligible. I was determined to overcome my inherent
shyness and stage fright.
During the spring of my senior year, I was chosen for the lead in the
class play and elected as one of the commencement orators; more than should
have been given to anyone boy. The play passed pleasantly; it was fun and I
learned why some people choose a theatrical career, but I was wedded to the
law! During the excitement of the commencement exercises the following
evening, I forgot to bring a copy of the oration I had written and I did not
think of it until it was too late to return home for it. I was consequently
without a prompter in the wings, and I could not recall a single word of my
speech, only the lines of the play of the previous evening. I sat in agony
until my turn to speak came and I was introduced. Not knowing what else
to do, I went forward. When I placed my hand on the podium in the non-
chalant manner in which I had been coached, the first and succeeding words
came to mind, and I sailed through my speech without an error or hesita-
tion; the best delivery I had ever made. It was not until years later, after I
had studied psychology, that I found an explanation for this "miracle."
Athletics. Champaign High School, when I entered it, fielded teams in
three sports: football, baseball, and track-and-field. Basketball was introduced
in my senior year. I competed for and won positions on all of them; I played
tackle and fullback in football; catcher in baseball; threw the hammer and
put the shot in track-and-field; and played guard in basketball. Football was
my favorite sport despite the fact that my right collarbone was broken in my
sophomore year, and I received a brain concussion in my senior year. Since
I wrote with my right hand, I thought that I was doubly unfortunate in this
injury because I had, in order to keep up with my classes and avoid the
academic loss of the semester. to learn to write with my left hand. I prac-
ticed assiduously and soon was handing in my assignments on time and going
to the blackboard in my turn. I did not stop with writing; I learned to do
all the unimanual activities with my left hand, and by the time I had re-
gained the use of my right arm and hand, I was ambidextrous. Before the
accident, however, I was definitely of the RRL type, the mixed type, of
handedness (Downey, 1927, p. 319; Titchener, 1899, pp. 474 ff.) in which
the bimanual activities (batting, chopping, shoveling, sweeping) are done
lefthandedly. That I was of the mixed type may be the reason I became ambi-
dextrous so easily. I am still able, after more than fifty years, to write with
70 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

either hand. My writing with the right hand, a degenerated Spencerian, is

much more rapid but less legible than with my left hand-a rounded vertical.
Both injuries were received during practice; I was never injured during
a game, nor after high school.
Every summer, during my childhood and young manhood, after return-
ing from a vacation spent visiting distant relatives or at a northern lake, I
hunted up the hardest job I could find so that I would be in good physical
shape for football. One summer I worked with a ditching gang extending
sewers into the new additions being laid out at the edge of town; the next
two I worked on a cement gang laying sidewalks; and then with a dredging
gang. The work on all of these jobs was done by hand. Ditch-digging ma-
chines and cement mixers were not even dreamed of in those days. The
working hours in all of them were from 7 to 12 A.M., and 1 to 6 P.M., and
the pay was 25 cents per hour. By the time school opened and football prac-
tice got under way, I was in excellent physical shape.
Checkers, Chess, and "Go." My father's chief diversion during my child-
hood was checkers, which he played every Sunday evening with a friend.
Because Dad played checkers, I wished to play and was given permission to
watch the game when played at our house, if I sat quietly by and did not
disturb them. I complied, but after a session of silent and attentive observa-
tion, I asked to be taught the game. To my delight, they agreed.
They were good teachers, and I was soon defeating them. Instead of be-
ing resentful at losing to a lad, they were proud of the player they had
developed and matched me with the best players in town, in the county,
and, when I reached high school, with the former champion of Central
Illinois, an elderly man who had given up tournament play. In the twenty-
game match with him, we drew seventeen, he won one, and I won two. He
was the best player I had ever met.
During my sophomore year at the University, I participated in the
organization of The University Chess and Checker Club, which annually
sponsored tournaments in those games. I entered the checker tournament in
my sophomore and junior years and won the championship both times. In my
senior year, I took up chess, that is, I learned how the different pieces were
moved, and I also learned the Japanese game of "Co." I was introduced to
"Go" by my cousin, a librarian at the Chicago Public Library, who had him-
self learned of it by reading a German book on the game which had been
received by the library. We had previously played checkers, but when I
reached the point in my play when I defeated him regularly, he shifted to
"Go," a game with which I was unfamiliar. He gave me a "Go"-board, and a
set of the "stones" and taught me the rules and a bit of the strategy of play.
After my introduction to chess and "Go," I gave up checkers. There simply
was not enough time to play all of them-indeed, there was not enough time
to play any of them-but nevertheless, I made time. They all are fine games,
but, in my opinion, "Go" stands to chess as chess does to checkers-and as
KARL M. DALLENBACH 71

checkers stands to "mill," a game my grandmother taught me during child-

hood.
Golf. I began playing golf during middle childhood at about nine years
of age, when the boys of the neighborhood were urged to serve as caddies
at the nine-hole course that had just been opened in the city. As caddies were
permitted to play golf on the course when not otherwise engaged, several of
the larger boys and I did more playing than caddying. By the time I was
sixteen years old, I was playing near-par golf and was disappointed when I
did not break forty; once I made thirty-three. This group practically lived on
the links, going out early in the morning and staying until late afternoon. I
discovered, as other claims on my time arose, that I had to play daily or
become a "dub." Since I could not play daily and my self-imposed standards
would not permit me to be a "dub," I abruptly quit the game, intending to
return to it when time permitted, which it has not as yet done.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

Before I registered at the University, my father made it quite clear to me

that I was not to play football or to join a fraternity until I had demon-
strated that I could do university work. Though I wished to do both, there
was too much at stake, hence I agreed.
Academic. I registered as long planned for the law course in the College
of Arts and Sciences. The fifteen advanced credits I had received from high
school freed me from the necessity of taking mathematics and science-the
courses I liked most and in which I did best. 1\1y work was therefore concen-
trated in fields in which I was less interested and did not do as well. Since
they were required in the pre-law course, I had to take them.
Near the end of the first semester, to aid me in my courses, I joined
the Adelphic Literary Society, an organization that was founded at the open-
ing of the University. There were, at the time of my joining, six literary
societies: three for men and three for women. All held weekly meetings and
the programs of all of them were much the same. The Adelphic's meetings
were opened by music, vocal or instrumental, and followed by orations,
essays, declamations, book reviews, and a debate of a popular subject that
was decided by the vote of the audience. The meetings were closed by a
"critic," usually a faculty member of the society, who reviewed the evening's
events and criticized them kindly. The societies were thus extra-curricular
laboratories for the Departments of Rhetoric, English, and Public Speaking.
The members learned to express themselves on their feet. In addition to the
weekly programs, the society, in conjunction with one or another of the
women's societies, produced a play every year. To overcome my natural shy-
ness, I attended the meetings regularly and accepted any and every assign-
ment. I consequently participated in many programs, every annual play,
the Intra- and Inter-Society declamation contests, and competed every year
72 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

for the University Debating Teams. I never, however, succeeded in making

a University Debating Team. My failure was due chiefly to my inability to
shift loyalties. After I had studied a question and had evaluated the argu-
ments pro and con and had come to a conclusion that I thought was right,
I could not, with conviction, argue for the other side. A debater, as I learned,
must be able to do that; indeed, he frequently does not know which side he
is to represent until shortly before he is to speak. Debating is not a search
for truth, like science, but is a game, like chess or checkers, in which the
more skillful manipulators of the arguments win. I simply was not cut out
to be a debater-nor, perhaps, to be a lawyer. Could I, with conviction, de-
fend a client I knew to be guilty?
After I had passed the first semester's work, I was permitted to join a
fraternity, Delta Upsilon. During the second semester, one of the upper
classmen of that fraternity advised me regarding the selection of courses for
my sophomore year. He strongly recommended elementary psychology, which
I had avoided because I identified it with phrenology. As he was a pre-law
student, I accepted his recommendation and registered for the course with
John Wallace Baird. The class was large. To avoid the time-consuming task
of calling the roll, he seated the class alphabetically and thereafter marked the
absentees, which were few, by noting the numbers on the vacant seats. He
stood during his lecture, spoke extemporaneously, richly demonstrated his
lectures, and invited questions, which I, sitting in the front row, frequently
asked. When he carne to color blindness, he sought to demonstrate the Holm-
gren test. He called for a volunteer; none offered and without making a sec-
ond appeal he called upon me to take it. He demonstrated the method with
me and, to his delight, found that I was color-blind. I then knew why I
wished white instead of red Rags on the golf course; why I could not see
cherries on a tree from a distance; and I also learned later why I could not
taste at the center of my tongue-it was not because I had pulled the skin
from it during childhood, but because there were no end organs there. Baird
used Tichenor's An Outline of Psychology (1899) as his textbook, which was
so simply, clearly, and interestingly written that it invited its own study. The
course was the most interesting I had ever taken; it was Science.
Lacking the prerequisites to take Baird's courses during the second se-
mester, I elected Frederick Kuhlmann's course in abnormal psychology.
Though Kuhlmann used a heavily written book as a text, M. W. Barr's
M ental Defectives (1910), and sat at his desk and lectured from notes, as
did most of my teachers, I found the course very interesting. He took the
class to institutions for the feebleminded and insane where inmates, illustrat-
ing the various types he had discussed in class, were brought before us. The
course opened up aspects of human life of which I previously knew nothing.
As I had discovered in high school, I did best in my academic subjects
when I submerged my Epimetheusian characteristics by extra work. I there-
fore, after my freshman year, elected an extra course every semester which
KARL M. DALLENBACH 73

fell outside the pre-law curriculum. Among those elected were mechanical
and freehand drawing, clay modeling and sculpture, and astronomy.
During my sophomore year, I conceived the idea of taking notes in class
in shorthand and transcribing them with a typewriter and of handing in
typewritten reports. Thus, instead of hunting for the hardest work I could
find the following summer to prepare myself for football, which I was con-
templating playing again in the fall, I attended Champaign Business College
and learned shorthand and typing. I thought that notes in shorthand would
be better than those in longhand and that their transcription would be all
that would be required in the way of studying, and also that typewritten re-
ports would receive higher grades than those in longhand. I was wrong about
the first two assumptions-my notes in shorthand were not better than my
handwritten ones, and their transcription did not relieve me from further
study. My third assumption was, however, correct; typewritten reports, rarely
submitted by students in those days, did receive higher grades than longhand.
In my junior year, I elected Baird's two-semester course in experimental
laboratory. Titchener's Student's Manual of Qualitative Experiments (1902)
was used as a text and worked through during the course of the year. Baird
lectured upon the experiments as we took them up, and he circulated among
the class, assisting the laboratory-pairs in their work. The courses were the
most interesting I had ever taken, even more interesting than elementary
psychology. Every experiment was an adventure into a new world of experi-
ence. They were not work; they were fun. I did, however, work upon my
reports. Because of my training in the art department, I was able to illus-
trate my reports richly with drawings of the apparatus, and my results by
charts, diagrams, and graphs. My grade on the first semester reports, which
were typewritten after I received a typewriter at Christmas, was "99," with
the notation "Except for misspellings, your grade would have been a pos-
sible." To correct my spelling, my weakest subject in grammar school, I
looked up every word about which I had any doubt and handed in reports
during the second semester without misspellings. At the end of the semester,
Baird gave me a "possible." He asked me for my reports, had them bound,
and deposited them in the laboratory as an example for later students to
emulate.
In addition to Baird's experimental course, I took social psychology and
child psychology under S. S. Colvin, the head of the department; comparative
psychology under Kuhlmann; the seminary conducted by the departmental
staff; and the courses in philosophy that were germane to psychology (ancient
and medieval philosophy) under D. H. Bode. Colvin, like Kuhlmann, re-
mained seated during his lectures and was tied to his notes. I did not enjoy
his courses as much as I did the others, since they were more theoretical,
speculative, and less factual. Bode, like Baird, stood while he lectured and
spoke extemporaneously. His courses were interesting, easy to follow and
understand.
74 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In March of my junior year (1909), Titchener visited the University

and gave his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-
Processes (1909)-his answer to the work on "imageless thought" done by
Kulpe and his students at the University of Wiirzburg. Though I did not
know who Kiilpe was, nor had I heard of the Wurzburg school against
which Titchener inveighed, I attended everyone of his lectures and was
entranced by them. Baird, a former student of Titchener, took him through
the laboratory, introduced him to the students assembled there to meet him,
and showed him my laboratory reports as a sample of the work done in it.
After looking through my reports, Titchener complimented me upon them
and suggested that I come to Cornell for a doctorate in psychology. His men-
tion of a "doctorate in psychology at Cornell" was a wedge between my long-
sustained desire for the law and my recently acquired interest in psychology.
The courses in experimental psychology were popular and the capacity
of the laboratory was taxed. Baird taught the courses alone until the end of
my junior year, when he was granted a student assistant, effective the fol-
lowing term. He offered the position to me, and I gladly accepted. The ap-
pointment greatly increased my indecision about my life's work. Until then
I had been studying psychology for the aid it would give me in law, but
now I was considering turning to psychology and studying it for its own sake.
The decision was not urgent as I had another year in which to consider it.
Because of the advanced credits I received from high school and the
extra courses I had carried every semester following my freshman year, I
needed only six credits for graduation at the end of my junior year. I could
have taken them during the following summer school and have received my
degree in August. I did not choose to do that, however) for several compelling
reasons: I did not wish to be graduated before my class; I did not wish to miss
the trip that my parents were planning to the West Coast and the visit with
my older brother, who was practicing medicine in Seattle where the Alaska,
Yukon, Pacific Exposition was being held that summer; and I did not wish
to make myself ineligible for athletics during the corning year, which a degree
would do.
One evening during the winter of my junior year, while sitting in the
lounge in front of the grate in my fraternity, I heard one of the members
tell of his trip to Europe the previous summer on a "cattleboat.' His tale was
so interesting and the trip was so inexpensive, I decided to take a similar
one during the summer following my graduation. I immediately told my
father about it and asked his permission to take it. He refused, but all the
friends with whom I discussed it were interested and enthusiastic and many
more agreed to go than I thought could be accommodated. I did not, how-
ever, refuse or discourage anyone, thinking future events would cause my
father to change his mind. I continued to discuss the trip with my father
and with others in his presence. Since the trip was so far in the future, over
a year, I thought he would be reconciled to it by the time I planned to go.
Sure enough, he was. When I overheard him telling a visitor that I was
KARL M. DALLENBACH 75
going to work my way to Europe the following summer on a cattleboat, I
knew the trip was assured.
In my senior year, in addition to the assistantship under Baird and the
required courses in pre-law, I elected the seminary in psychology, a course
with Kuhlmann in mental and physical tests, one with Bode on Kant, and
clay modeling (sculpture) in the Department of Fine Arts. My work as an
assistant was pleasant and agreeable. It consisted chiefly in removing ap-
paratus from the shelves before the students arrived, in replacing it after they
had left. and in supervising their work while in the laboratory.
During the first semester, I sought Baird's advice about making psy-
chology my vocation. He opened the conference by saying that he never gave
advice, that he did not wish to bear the responsibility of another person's
decision, but that he would gladly discuss my problem with me. He said
further that I had done well thus far, that I might become a good psychologist,
but that "psychology was a long and rocky road and that the only person
who should enter it was one who could be happy in traveling no other."
I was not discouraged in my talk with him; indeed, I admired him more than
ever for his point of view and adopted it as my own. I have never since
given advice. I gladly talk over the pros and cons of a problem that a person
brings to me, but the decision must be his own. The differences among
people in regard to giving advice are great. Some, like Baird, after discussing
the advisee's problem with him, cast it back into his lap in the hope and
expectation that he will be able to resolve the problem himself. Many others,
like my instructor in clay modeling, a course I greatly en joyed and in which
I did well, give advice freely. Upon the basis of my work in a single course,
he advised and urged me to become a sculptor. He said I had talent and pre-
dicted a future for me in that art. I was not moved in the slightest by him,
as I was at that time deeply engaged in the struggle between psychology and
law, with psychology a bit in the ascendancy. I have often pondered, how-
ever, what I would have become and where I would now be, had I followed
his advice; the mystery of "what might have been."
In January, 1910, at the end of the first semester of my senior year,
Baird left Illinois for the chair in experimental psychology at Clark Uni-
versity, vacated by Edmund C. Sanford's elevation to the presidency of Clark
College. Baird was replaced at Illinois by Arthur Sutherland, who had ob-
tained his doctorate the previous spring (June, 1909) at the University of
Chicago. He was not an experimentalist, but he wisely did not alter the
routine of the experimental course. He gave the weekly lectures but placed
me in charge of the laboratory, as he was not familiar with the experiments
that were scheduled.
Though I had more than enough credits for my degree at the end of the
first semester, I avoided January graduation because I still wished to retain my
eligibility for spring athletics. I entered the graduate school and started re-
search on an M.A. thesis under Kuhlmann on "The Relation of Memory
Error to Time Interval" (Dallenbach, 1913), an aspect of the Aussage prob-
76 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

lem, the subject considered in the seminary the previous semester. To com-
plete my schedule that semester, I elected the departmental seminary and
another course in philosophy under Bode. I was graduated in June with 150
credit hours.
After Baird left, my desire for psychology was dimmed. A decision-law
or psychology-had to be made that spring, and law was again in the as-
cendancy. Shortly before the end of that semester, I saw a circular upon the
departmental bulletin board announcing a fellowship in psychology for the
following year at the University of Pittsburgh. Here was a way out of my
dilemma. I applied for it and asked Baird to write in my behalf. If I received
it, I would go forward to an M.A. degree in psychology and postpone the
decision between law and psychology for another year; if I did not, I would
go to Harvard the following fall for a degree in law. I would let events, for
the time being at least, decide my problem for me. This decision, if it may
be regarded as one, was a great relief.
Athletics. In keeping with the letter of the promise that my father ex-
tracted from me when I entered the University, I did not play football that
first fall. Nothing, however, was said about coaching, hence I assisted the
coach of the Champaign High School team. I did this because new rules
regarding the forward pass had just been adopted, and I thought, if I were
ever to play football again, I should keep abreast of the new developments.
After the football season was over, I went out for the freshman swimming
and the track-and-field teams. I made the freshman water polo team, but
found little pleasure in the game, which was very different from the one
played now. It was chieHy a wrestling match in water; fighting for the pos-
session of a half-inHated rubber ball and attempting to carry it forward and
to touch the goal at the ends of the pool. I had, in consequence of playing
it, a head cold all winter. I stuck to the game for the season, but never again
went out for it, although urged by the coach and players to do so. It was not
"fun." I made the freshman track-and-field team in the hammer and shot
and was elected its student manager, an "errand-boy" for the coach.
In my sophomore and succeeding years, I ventured, in addition to track-
and-field, to go out secretly for football. I played guard with the sophomore
team that won the interclass championship and with the varsity teams in my
junior and senior years. From my freshman to senior years, after the close
of the football season, I wrestled, boxed, and lifted weights until the opening
of the outdoor season for track. I did not improve much in track; I was
mediocre throughout the years, but still good enough to make the squad and
now and then to win a third place. I was good enough in wrestling, however,
to represent my class at the interclass matches. Wrestling was not at that
time an intercollegiate sport, but intra- and interclass championships, at the
different weights, were annually held. In my senior year, I again won the
right to represent my class in the heavyweight division and finally won the
University championship.
KARL M. DALLENBACH 77
It was with regret and a tinge of sadness that I played the last game
of football in my senior year. I thought my football days were over. I was
greatly pleased and highly complimented, therefore, when the director of
athletics and the head and line coaches individually summoned me to their
offices after the season and informed me that I had another year of eligibility
and asked and urged me to delay my graduation a year, since a degree would
make me ineligible. My teammates and many of my friends and acquaintances
urged me to do it, but I finally decided in the negative because I could not
permit my class to be graduated without me.

EUROPEAN TRIP ON THE CAlTLEBOAT

As the time for the trip to Europe on the cattleship neared, my class-
mates, who once were enthusiastic for the trip and had promised to go,
dropped out one by one until only one was left. Having talked so much
about the trip and knowing nothing about its hardships, I would have taken
it even if it meant going alone. Fortunately, that was saved me. My
companion and I left the afternoon of commencement for Montreal to take
ship to London. My father accompanied us to the railroad station, and before
the train pulled out he gave me an envelope containing a liberal amount of
money. I had not asked him for half, as I had said from the first men-
tion of the trip that I would pay for it out of my own savings. Though I had
not as yet heard from Pittsburgh regarding my application for the fellowship
in psychology, I left all worry behind.
As soon as we arrived in Montreal, we hunted at the docks for the
employment agency whose business it was to supply laborers for ships leaving
for Europe. To our surprise and great pleasure, we found two of our class-
mates there, the survivors of a group who had separately planned a cattle-
boat trip to Europe. We joined forces, took ship that afternoon, and steamed
away early the next morning for London.
The work was hard, and it had to be done whether one was seasick or
not (which I was most of the trip), and our food was as bad as we were
warned it would be. Both were tolerable with companions in misery, but I
would not choose to make the trip alone. We docked at London, where we
stayed a week during which we visited Hampton Court to see its famous
maze, facsimiles of which Kuhlmann used in one of his courses in psychology.
Then, starting in Holland, we spent the remainder of the summer on the
continent, arriving back at Amsterdam the afternoon before our ship was to
leave for home.

UNIVERSITY OF PIlTSBURGH

When I arrived home, I learned that I had been awarded the fellow-
ship in psychology. My hope for another year of grace before coming to a
decision regarding my life's work had been vouchsafed me.
78 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Academic. 1\1y fellowship was one of six that had been granted in as
many different departments to mark the establishment of the graduate school
at Pittsburgh. Though late in receiving the notification of my appointment,
I was at Pittsburgh in time to attend a conference of the fellows, called by
the dean of the graduate school, at which we met each other and were wel-
comed to the University. With two of the fellows, Karl S. Lashley, in biology,
and Roy H. Uhlinger, in chemistry, I formed close and lasting friendships.
Uhlinger, reporting early, had found for himself a rooming house within
a short walking distance from the University. As there was still a vacancy
there, he took me, after the dean's brief meeting, to see it. I signed up for it
immediately and then returned to the University for a conference with J. H.
White, professor and sole member of the Department of Psychology. White
had recently taken his doctorate at Clark University under G. Stanley Hall.
Though not himself an experimental psychologist, he had acquired Hall's
interest in and respect for the laboratory and had, during the previous spring,
announced and ordered apparatus for the new course.
At the conference with White, my duties were defined and my course
of study was planned. l\1y principal duty was to organize and teach the
laboratory. The apparatus, Stoelting Complny's duplication of that used in
Titchcner's manual, was still packed in the boxes in the room reserved
for the laboratory. I was familiar with that apparatus and soon had the boxes
unpacked and the various pieces arranged upon the shelves provided for
them. I followed Baird's organization of the course and his method of teach-
ing; I knew no other.
1\1y course of study was a perplexing problem. As I had taken every
course offered in psychology at Illinois, there was none at Pittsburgh I had
not taken. Since the die committing me to a career in psychology now seemed
to have been cast, I thought I should learn more about the human organism
and therefore proposed courses in biology and physiology. White highly
approved, but suggested, since those courses in the College of Arts and
Sciences were chieRy concerned with animals and only incidentally with man,
that I take them in the Medical College. His point was well taken, and so it
was decided.
We then turned to the discussion of a topic for my M.A. thesis. He
asked me for suggestions. I told him of the Aussage problem I had started
during the past semester at Illinois under Kuhlmann's direction and sug-
gested, since only half the work planned had been completed, that it be con-
tin ued (l913). After explaining the specific problem undertaken and de-
scribing the results obtained and the work still to be done, I readily gained his
assent. Work on my thesis was therefore well underway.
The courses I wished to take in the medical school-neurology, phys-
iology, and embryology-were given in the sophomore year of medicine. For
a student to elect sophomore courses before completing the prerequisites in
the freshman year was unprecedented; my registration was refused. I re-
KARL M. DALLENBACH 79

ported this to White, he to the dean of the graduate school, and he to the
president of the University and the dean of the medical school. Because I
was not a medical student, but a fellow in the graduate school, the problem
was resolved in my favor, and I was permitted to take such courses as I de-
sired.
All of the fellows, as I learned later, had courses or laboratories to teach.
Lashley taught the laboratory in biology that I would have taken with him
had I not been granted the privilege of registering in the medical school.
He wished to take the laboratory in psychology with me. As elementary psy-
chology was a prerequisite, and he did not have time to satisfy it, he requested
that it be waived. My experience in registering in the medical school had
bearing upon his request, and White immediately granted it. Lashley's first
course in psychology was therefore a qualitative laboratory. He skillfully per-
formed the experiments and was one of the best introspectors in the class.
In addition to this association, we played chess as frequently as time per-
mitted, though neither of us knew little more about the game than how the
different pieces were moved.
My work went well throughout the year, which passed quickly and
busily. I completed the experimental work on my thesis by the end of the
first semester and presented the manuscript to White early in l\1ay. It was
lengthy and richly illustrated with charts, figures, tables, and diagrams, which
my undergraduate courses in drawing made possible. White was pleased with
it, and I received my M.A. degree that June (1911).
During the year, I became fascinated by the courses in the medical
school. They were scientific. Except for Baird's courses in psychology, I had
studied nothing so interesting since chemistry, physics, and physiology in
high school-subjects I had avoided in college because of my dedication to
a career in law. Medicine, during the course of the year at Pittsburgh, had
replaced law; now my mental struggle was between medicine and psychology.
After weeks of worry and mental conflict, I again decided to permit events
to decide.
Recalling the invitation that Titchener had given me at Illinois, I ap-
plied to Cornell and only to Cornell, putting all my eggs in one basket, for
the Sage Fellowship in Psychology. If I received it, I would go forward to
a doctorate in psychology; if I did not, I would enter the medical school at
Pittsburgh. I asked Baird and White to write Titchener in my behalf and
settled back, resolved to be content with whatever came to pass.
I might have applied to Clark for a fellowship with more hope of suc-
cess and have worked under Baird, who was my inspiration and ideal, but I
did not. Five of his students at Illinois followed him to Clark for their doc-
torates; that I, the student he had chosen for his assistant, did not was not
due to my lack of admiration of or respect for him. Quite to the contrary,
my application was to Cornell and Cornell alone, because of my admiration
for him. He had studied and had taken his doctorate under Titchener. I
80 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wished to do as he had done; nothing less would satisfy me. My feeling for
Baird is best shown by the fact that my first son, John Wallace, was named
after him-a name to which my wife readily agreed because they were also
the first names of my father and of hers.
Titchener, when acknowledging receipt of my application, invited me
to Cornell for an interview during the coming Easter vacation. I made the
trip and was received graciously in his home. The interview extended over an
afternoon. He asked about my work at Pittsburgh and approved highly of my
studies in the medical school, which encouraged me. But when he said, "Oh,
a study in applied psychology" after I had described my master's thesis-
the disparaging tone more than the words, discouraged me. I did not know
that I had been working in applied psychology; indeed, I did not know at
that time the difference between applied and other kinds of psychology.
I broke the lull which followed that remark by asking him in which
theory of vision he believed. He replied: "Believe? Believe! Why, I don't
believe in any." Then followed a discourse upon theory and its place in
experiment which ended with the admonition to "carry your theories lightly"
CDallenbach, 1953). That was strange advice to me, since throughout my
training thus far theory had played an important role. We had, even in
Baird's and Bode's courses, discussed and ardently defended the theories of
our choice. As the fellowship for which I was applying was not mentioned
during the interview, I returned to Pittsburgh that evening with small hope
that my application would be seriously considered. My thesis was in applied
psychology; I had displayed my ignorance regarding the place of theory in
science. Soon after I returned to Pittsburgh, however, I was notified that I
had been awarded the Sage Fellowship. The die had again been cast in favor
of psychology.
Athletics. For many years, fall meant football to me. The Pittsburgh
papers were full of news of the University's team. Though practice was open
to the public, I did not go out to see it because I was too busy getting regis-
tered, my laboratory in order, and my room arranged. Finally, a few days
before the first game, I went to the practice field. I was struck by the size
and maturity of the players. While watching practice, the urge for the game
returned in full force, and I introduced myself to the coach, told him of my
football experience, and offered my services for free as an assistant coach.
Instead of accepting my offer at once, as I hoped he would, he questioned
me, and then astonished me by asking me whether I would be interested
in playing on the team. It seemed that my degree, which made me ineligible
for further play at Illinois, made me a free agent and eligible at Pittsburgh.
I was interested and played right guard on the team which played nine
games, won them all, scoring 282 points to our opponents' 0; under present
methods of scoring, about 360-0. During the following spring, I threw the
hammer on the track-and-field team.
As soon as I "made" the football team, the fraternities, both social and
KARL M. DALLENBACH 81

medical, rushed me. Since I was a member of a social fraternity, I could not
join another, but as a member of the sophomore class in the medical school,
I could and did join a medical fraternity, Nu Sigma Nu.
While I was playing football, Uhlinger, my roommate, enlisted in the
student company of the Pennsylvania National Guard. Its drill hall bordered
the University and its officers were members of the Pittsburgh faculty. Noth-
ing would satisfy him until 1 too enlisted, which 1 did when I learned that
rifles and ammunition were furnished to those who wished to improve their
marksmanship. By practicing assiduously, I rapidly passed through the grades
of marksman, sharpshooter, to expert rifleman.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY (1911-1912)

To get a good start upon my work at Cornell, I arrived in Ithaca a week
early. After locating a rooming house and a boarding club close to the
campus, I reported to Professor Titchener. He gave me an appointment for
the next afternoon. With time on my hands, I visited the Cornell chapter of
my fraternity, where I met the captain of the Cornell football team. Our con-
versation quite naturally turned to football and he hoped, and raised in me
the hope, that I might be allowed to play for Cornell.
At my conference with Professor Titchener the next afternoon. I asked
him about my playing football. To my surprise and delight, he approved. He
had been an athlete in his student days, being on the tennis and fencing
teams at Oxford, and coaching the fencing team at Cornell for several years
after joining that faculty. He had, therefore, an athlete's point of view. After
sanctioning my play of football, which the registrar, a stickler for rules, later
vetoed, Titchener explained briefly the Cornell system of graduate study and
then turned to the research that he wished me to undertake for my doctoral
dissertation.
System of Graduate Study. The Cornell system of graduate study, a
transplant from Germany, was unlike any educational system I had ever en-
countered. From the Iirst grade through my graduate year at Pittsburgh, I
was assigned work and there was a teacher standing over me to see that I
did it and to grade my performance. This was not the case at Cornell; no
graduate courses were offered, none of the undergraduate courses were re-
quired. The graduate student was allowed perfect freedom to prepare himself
for his final oral examination in any way he wished; by studying in the
library, by experimenting in the laboratory, or by attending undergraduate
courses of his choice. Many students were unable to survive this degree of
freedom; they required the compulsion of a teacher. Those who did survive,
who learned to depend upon their own initiative, were the productive scholars
of the future.
In addition to the major subject, every doctoral student was required
to elect two minors. As some of the professors directing "minors" tried to get
82 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

"major" work from their minors, many students "shopped around" among the
different departments and elected minors entailing the least work. Some
curious combinations of major and minors resulted from this procedure.
Though Titchener advised me to "shop around," I did not. I knew precisely
the minors I wished to elect. My first, under Professor Benjamin F. Kings-
bury, was in histology and embryology in the medical school (the first two
years of which were then given in Ithaca); it was work that would later
count toward an M.D. degree, my urge for which still lingered. My second,
under Professor C. M. Whipple, an engaging man and teacher, was in edu-
cational psychology, a popular and rapidly growing field. I would have been
wiser had I followed Titchener's advice, or at least have had their course
requirements stipulated in writing, because, finding a willing worker, both
of these men added research to their already heavy requirements. I was
eventually carrying what amounted to three majors.
As I did not then know enough to direct my study in the library and
laboratory, I elected undergraduate courses in which the instructors or-
ganized the work. Since a graduate student was merely a "visitor" in an
undergraduate course, he was not required to take the examinations given in
it; I did, however, to mark my progress. The doctorate depended solely upon
the candidate's dissertation and his performance in his final oral examination.
Among the outstanding undergraduate courses I attended was Professor
Madison Bentley's in systematic psychology. Bentley's course made me aware,
for the first time, of the division of psychology into schools. I was distressed
to learn that psychology was a Hydra-headed subject, but glad to discover
that Titchener was the leader of the school with which I had unknowingly
affiliated myself during my work with Baird. I also learned in this course the
significance of the lectures on "imageless thought" that I had heard Titchener
give at Illinois. In psychophysics I was, as I recall, the only student; and
Boring and I worked through the experiments in Titchener's Student's Quan-
titative l\1anual (1905, Part I) and read the Instructor's Manual (1905, Part
II) in conjunction with them. Working together in this course, we estab-
lished a life-long friendship.
Dissertation. After Titchener's appointment in 1909 to a professorship
in the graduate school, he did not go to the University except on Monday
evenings of the second semester when he met his seminary. He conducted his
work from his study at home. Students wishing to see him-he directed the
work of all the doctoral students-had to make appointments long in advance.
Because he was particularly interested in the dissertation he had assigned
me, "The Measurement of Attention," he saw me promptly whenever I
requested a conference. His interest in my work derived from his postulation
that clearness (vividness, attensity) was an intensive attribute of sensation
and, as such, was the elementary basis of attention (Titchener, 1910, p. 53;
1913, pp. 191-317), the doctrine he developed in his Lectures on the Ele-
mentary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908).
KARL M. DALLENBACH 83

In his review of the literature on attention, Titchener found that the

writers on the topic described the processes attended to as being clearer and
more vivid, outstanding, insistent, impressive, and eindringlich, than those
attended from. He had therefore many terms from which to choose, and he
unfortunately chose "clearness." Unfortunately, because his use of that term,
even when qualified by "sensory" or "attributive," was confused with "cogni-
tive" clearness, i.e. clearness to the understanding. If he had used "vividness"
at the outset, much confusion would have been avoided, since "vividness"
is an experiental, not a cognitive, term. During the course of my study at
Cornell, I had the temerity to ask him why he had selected "clearness." He
readily admitted that his choice had been unwise and told me that it had
been made purely on the basis of empathy (Einfiihling) (Titchener, 1909,
p. 21); that the word "clearness" was round and forward-flowing, whereas
"vividness" was angular and prickly. He dropped "clearness" for "vividness"
in his A Beginner's Psychology (1915, p. 66) and later coined the term
"attensity" for this dimension of experience (Titchener, 1924).
Upon the assumption that the phenomenon measured is like in kind
to the units measuring it (e.g. if measurable in feet or meters, it is like those
units a spatial phenomenon; if in seconds, a temporal phenomenon),
Titchener assigned L. R. Geissler the problem of measuring attention in
terms of attributive clearness (Geissler, 1909). Working in the field of vision,
Geissler demonstrated that attention could be measured in terms of attribu-
tive clearness. Since, however, his experiments were limited to the held of
vision, which itself possesses an anatomical focus and margin and is subject
to sensory as well as attentional adaptation, Geissler obtained no conclusive
results. His method of measuring attention had to be tested by experiments
in audition, touch, and imagery=fields that lack physiological foci and mar-
gins. The measurement of attention in the field of audition, which lacks
sensory adaptation in addition to a focus and a margin, was assigned to me.
My study corroborated Geissler's results. I, too, found that attention could
be measured introspectively in terms of attributive clearness. The need to
carry the work into the helds of touch and imagery was not, therefore, as
great, but the work was planned for touch and completed later with corrobora-
tive results (Dallenbach, 1916).
Chess. During the fall of my first semester at Cornell, my landlord, a
devoted chess player, taught me the game. Due probably to the identical
elements in checkers and chess-planning and foreseeing moves-I improved
my game rapidly. I was, under his instructions, making moves with a plan
in mind, not merely, as in the games with Lashley, because it was my move.
Very soon I was defeating my landlord consistently; he was not a strong
player. He brought up the subject of blindfold play and we marveled to-
gether over that "strange ability." He told me that he had once attempted
it and proudly said that he had carried it twenty moves before breaking.
He badgered me into playing a game blindfolded, though I thought it ridic-
84 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ulous for me to attempt it and utterly impossible for me to do. All I hoped
for was to carry the play farther than he had done. To my great surprise and
his chagrin, I carried the game sixty-three moves through a pawn-ending and
mated him. I found that blindfold play was not difficult; indeed, I believe
that anybody playing a moderately fair game can play it. The difficulty in
blindfold play is in overcoming the mental block-something like that in-
volved in the running of the first four-minute mile.
Several months later, at a conference with Titchener, I casually men-
tioned that I had played a game of chess blindfolded. He was greatly inter-
ested and asked many questions about the mental processes involved. I had
requested the conference to discuss my dissertation, but it was chiefly de-
voted that evening to blindfold chess. He urged me to continue the play and
to undertake its study. If I would, he would place me on the program of the
experimental psychologists the coming spring at Clark University (Dallen-
bach, 1916, pp. 41 f.). I was puzzled by his interest and request, but was not
rash enough to ask the reason. I gladly agreed, and played two blindfolded
games simultaneously, then three, intending to increase the number until I
broke. Since the mental processes involved in multiple play were very dif-
ferent from those involved in a single game, he told me to devote the present
study to the single game and to take up multiple play later. The mental
processes involved in my play consisted of visual images, kinesthetic images,
sensations, verbal motor and verbal auditory images, concomitant attitudes,
and feelings.
I discovered at the spring meetings at which I read my paper the reason
for Professor Titchener's interest. He and Thorndike led a symposium on
"imageless thought." My analysis of the processes involved in blindfold chess
gave no support to the Wiirzburg School. Awaiting the resumption of my
study of multiple play, which I have never found time to do, the paper I
read at Clark was withheld from publication until I was invited to contribute
it to the Festschrift published in Titchener's honor in 1917 (Dallenbach,
1917).
l\1eals. Before the end of the first semester at Cornell, I found myself
so involved in work that I had to stay up later and later to accomplish it.
Since breakfast was not served at my boarding house after 8:00 A.M., I
missed more and more breakfasts. I seemed to get along without them, so I
finally decided to omit that meal and to sleep as long as I desired. I have
ever since then eaten but two meals a day. After I was married and could
breakfast at home at my convenience, I omitted the noon meal, thus sav-
ing the noon hour for work, a custom that I have since followed. My
weight, which jumped to 210 pounds after I had given up athletics, remained
there until I reached old age. By omitting the noon meal, I have gained, over
the years, thousands of hours, with no ill effects as far as I am aware.
Seminary. Titchener's seminary was held on Monday evenings during
the second semester every year. Though held in the graduate laboratory, it
KARL M. DALLENBACH 85
was not listed in the University catalogue. It was private, attendance being
restricted to those he invited. He gave the paper at the first meeting on the
topic to be studied by the seminary that year; dividing it into various sub-
topics which he assigned the members. After a discussion of his paper and
setting the dates at which the members' papers would be read, he served
refreshments, thereafter provided in rotation by the members. The social
hour usually ended about midnight.
Titchener demanded a high level of achievement in the papers pre-
sented in his seminary. If they did not meet his standard, his criticism was
purposely severe so that the quality of the papers following would be raised.
The topic of my first seminary at Cornell was "Applied Psychology," and I
was assigned a paper on the "Binet Mental Tests." I had but a week in which
to prepare it; I did the best I could in that time, but it was not good enough;
it drew his severe criticism. As he had anticipated, however, his criticism
"bore fruit." Everyone uf the papers following mine was excellent; many
were worthy of publication, and some were published. In my second seminary,
which was on "Functional Psychology," I was assigned the task of discovering
the source of the systematic use of "function" in psychology. My search car-
ried me back to "phrenology," the pseudo-science that delayed my study of
psychology. l\1y paper was scheduled for a date near the end of the semester,
hence I had several months to work on it. This time it was well received, and
Titchener encouraged me to publish it CDallenbach, 1915).
Smoking. During the course of my first seminary at Cornell, Titchener,
a chain smoker of cigars, pressed one of his big, black cigars upon me with
the facetious remark that "a man could not hope to become a psychologist
until after he had learned to smoke." I accepted his dare; it was "my first
cigar." I smoked it slowly during the seminary, and it seemingly had no
effect upon me. It was, however, a delayed bomb; it began to take effect as
I walked to my room after the seminary, and by the time I reached it I
was suffering from nicotine poisoning. It was worse than seasickness, and
I could not escape it by sleeping. It was seemingly an antidote to sleepiness
from which I suffered every evening about midnight, frequently falling asleep
at my desk when I should have been studying. Smoking might, as I thought,
be the solution of that problem. If I smoked just a little-plainly, a cigar was
too much-I might escape the resulting illness and enjoy the induced wakeful-
ness. I therefore bought a pipe and a small can of tobacco and tested my
theory. It worked; one pipeful sufficed, it induced wakefulness but not ill-
ness. Thereafter, whenever I beca~e sleepy, a few puffs on my pipe enabled
me to work as late as I wished. One small can of tobacco lasted me for weeks.
With the passage of time, I smoked more and more for the pleasure of it,
until now, as I fear, I am a chain pipe-smoker. What I need now, in the fall
of life, is an antidote to wakefulness.
Modeling. During my first year at Cornell, particularly during the fall
when the time previously devoted to football was vouchsafed me, I played
86 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

around with the things I had learned in clay modeling at Illinois. I intro-
duced into experimental psychology plaster of Paris armrests as replacements
for the wooden and felt rests then in use. The plaster rests cast especially
for every observer were not only more comfortable, but they insured that
the tissue would be brought to the same relative position at successive ex-
perimental periods. The superiority of the plaster rests was immediately
recognized; they were thereafter used at Cornell from whence their usage
spread to other laboratories. In addition. I modeled a bas-relief plaque of
Titchener, made plaster casts of it for the members of the department, and
later, as time permitted, I made life masks of the members of the department,
and mounted the heads in a frieze which Titchener hung in his office.
Titchener did not wish to be left out and asked me to make a life mask of
him. but I did not dare attempt it because of his full beard and bristly
moustache. I did. however, make casts of his right hand-one with fingers
spread and one with closed fist.

UNIVERSITY OF BONN

The graduate group of students then at Cornell was small, friendly, co-
operative, and intensely competitive; what one did, the others wished to do
and to do better. When I told them of my cattleboat trip to Europe, their
interest was aroused, and they proposed to take a similar trip during the
coming summer (1912) and asked me to accompany them. I readily agreed,
and we made plans to go to Leipzig to see Wundt and to attend his lectures.
As the time for our departure neared. the same thing happened as at Illinois
two years before; the number making the trip dwindled until only W. S.
Foster, A. S. Edwards, and I were left. Three were sufficient, hence the trip
was not abandoned. Agreeing to meet me on a specific date at a designated
hotel in Montreal, Foster and Edwards left for their homes. Before I left
to keep the date, Titchener gave me a number of his cards with introductions
written upon them so that I would be received by Wundt and other psy-
chologists I chanced to meet in Europe.
On my way to Montreal, I stopped at Oswego, Edwards' home town,
and learned that he could not take the trip because of severe illness in his
family. I therefore went on alone to keep the date with Foster. I registered
at the hotel at which I was to meet him and then engaged passage for the
two of us on a cattleboat that was leaving the next afternoon. As Foster
had not appeared by the next morning, I cancelled the passage and waited
for him to show. After waiting another day, I booked passage on a White-
Star liner to Liverpool, England. Knowing the hardships involved in work-
ing one's passage on a cattleboat, I simply did not have the courage to face
them alone.
The passage to Liverpool was enjoyable, as was the trip across England,
during which I stopped at Stratford-an-Avon to see the Shakespeare country
KARL M. DALLENBACH 87
and at Oxford to see the various colleges, lingering the longest at Brasenose,
Titchener's college. There I met the porter of the college, who became very
friendly when I gave him one of Titchener's cards and told him that I was
one of Titchener's students. He remembered Titchener well and took me to
see the room Titchener occupied while in the college. He also told me of
some of Titchener's escapades while there. In his youth, Titchener was far
from being the sedate, dignified man that he became as an adult in America.
From Oxford I went to London, saw some of the places I had missed
during my first visit, and then on to Cologne to call upon the American
Consul, Hirum Dunlap, a close and old friend of my parents. When Mr.
Dunlap learned the purpose of my trip, to meet Wundt and to attend his
lectures, he telephoned Leipzig and learned that Wundt was at his summer
home in Heidelberg and would not receive callers. What to do was now a per-
plexing question. Mr. Dunlap suggested that I spend the summer at the
University of Bonn, which was a short distance from Cologne. If I did, Mrs.
Dunlap added, I should plan to have dinner with them every Sunday. I still
hesitated because I knew nothing of that University, not even the professor
of psychology there. When Mr. Dunlap, obtaining a catalogue, said, "A man
by the name of Kulpe," my hesitation immediately vanished, as Kiilpe, next
to Wundt, was the man in Europe under whom I most desired to study.
Mr. Dunlap accompanied me to Bonn the next morning and assisted me
in registering in the University, which I doubt I could have accomplished
without the aid of the United States Consul. Then I went to see Kulpe, He
was not in his office, hence I went to his home. I introduced myself and gave
him one of Titchener's cards. He received me most kindly, and extended me
the privileges of a visiting colleague, a kind and generous act as it relieved
me of the necessity of paying tuition. The next day I attended his lectures
in elementary psychology and his seminary, which was held weekly in the
evening.
Kulpe's lectures in elementary psychology were given daily at II:00 A.M.
in a large room holding nearly 400 auditors. Promptly on the hour, he walked
to the rostrum from a door directly behind it and began his lecture. At the
same time, the doors of the lecture room were locked from the inside. The
disturbance caused by late arrivals, as I learned to my surprise when I was
a minute late one day, was not permitted. As soon as Ktilpe appeared, the
students stamped their feet, and they stamped throughout the hour whenever
he made a humorous observation or demonstrated an interesting experiment.
It was their method of applauding. His lectures were richly illustrated, hence
they were frequently interrupted by this, to me, strange applause. He closed
promptly on the hour, and his audience again stamped but did not move until
he had left the rostrum.
Kiilpe's seminary was conducted much like Titchener's. He introduced
me to the members as a "colleague from Cornell." Among those present were
Karl Buhler, then a Privatdocent who had followed Kiilpe to Bonn from
88 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Wurzburg, and Robert S. Woodworth and Lillian J. Martin, from America,

who were spending sabbatical leaves there. Buhler, who proposed that "image-
less thought" be accepted as a new element in psychology (Buhler, 1907;
1908) was gracious and invited me to attend his lectures on "The Psychology
of Thought." I gladly accepted, but he spoke so rapidly that I could not fol-
low him and got little out of the course. He was very friendly, however, and
did everything he could to assist me. So also did my fellow compatriots. W ood-
worth helped me to find a furnished room and took me to the Stammtisch
at which the more advanced of Kulpe's students, those I had met in the
seminary, came together every noon. At his, or Kulpe's, or on the initiative of
the members of the Stammtisch itself. I was invited to join it. I was pleased to
be included. Because of his many kindnesses, I felt toward Woodworth as
toward an older brother-and this feeling still persists.
The members of the Stammtisch met immediately after Kulpe's ele-
mentary lecture, which they all attended. Throughout the meal and long
after it, they sat around the table talking psychology. The discussions usually
started from the topic treated by Kulpe in the morning's lecture and went
from there wherever they listed. I had never before seen anything like it.
The German students lived, ate, slept, and dreamed psychology. None of
them played chess or checkers or games of any kind, and none indulged in
sports. They were dedicated to psychology. How, I thought, could the stu-
dents of psychology in America, who went their own ways after class, who
discussed sports, politics, and the news of the day when they did by chance
come together, hope to compete with their German confreres? I was greatly
discouraged about the status of study in America.
Shortly before the close of the term, I asked Kulpe for his photograph
and he gave me one. Forty years later I ran it in The American Journal of
Psychology as the frontispiece to R. M. Ogden's Nachruf of Kulpe (Ogden,
1951). The members of the Stamrntisch. were astonished and envious when I
showed them the photograph. None of them would have dared be so bold
as to request one. I was unaware that I had done anything indecorous or un-
toward. Kulpe had been very kind to me during my stay in Bonn. He once
had me to his home for dinner, and he also invited me to the formal celebra-
tion of his fiftieth birthday. I was pleased but a bit embarrassed because I
did not have formal clothes with me-who would think of taking dress clothes
on a cattleboat? When I told him of my lack, he said, "come as you are."
I did and was the only one there in informal dress. I wished his photograph.
As none was on sale in the bookstores in Bonn, the only way I knew how to
get one was to ask him for it. If that was being forward, let him who thinks
so do without a photograph!
On the way to Hamburg to board the ship for home, I made an Ausflug
to Wolfenbuttel to see my maternal grandfather's youngest sister. I had no
address for her and knew of her only as "Witwe Hartman." With the aid of
KARL M. DALLENBACH 89
the officials at the Rathaus, who rendered every assistance, I found my great-
aunt. After introducing myself and telling her of her American relatives, I
was taken by her son-in-law to my grandfather's former home, which had
not been changed since he had left it fifty-nine years earlier.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY (1912-1913)

While in Germany, I grew a beard, an imperial, which I kept short and
neatly trimmed, to surprise my professors and fellow students at Cornell.
They were surprised but no more so than I, as two of my fellow students,
W. S. Foster and C. A. Ruckmich, also returned with beards that they had
grown over the summer for reasons similar to mine. Except for the fact that
our beards were neatly trimmed (and also that the word had not been
coined), we were the "beatniks" of that day and generation. After we had
exhibited our beards, it became a matter of pride to see which of us would
weaken and be the Erst to cut his off. I would gladly have been second, but if
the other two wished to be stubborn, so could I. They were; hence we wore
beards and received our doctorates the following spring still wearing them. I
have worn mine ever since.
Upon my return to Cornell, I learned why Foster had failed to meet me
in Montreal. His parents would not permit him to work his passage to
Europe on a cattleboat. He did not telegraph because he thought that Ed-
wards and I would realize that if he was not there on the appointed date,
he was not corning, and we would go on without him!
To remove myself from the temptation of playing chess, I left myoId
rooming house and moved into Cascadilla Hall, a University dormitory chiefly
occupied by graduate students. Shortly after moving there, I joined the Acacia
Fraternity, an organization that was then restricted to students belonging to
the Masonic Lodge, which I had joined as an undergraduate when I turned
twenty-one years old. Its members were graduate students and its chapter
house, where I could get my meals, was only a short distance away. I greatly
enjoyed my associations that year. It was very different from a boarding club.
During the summer when I was away, Bentley accepted a call from
Illinois and Titchener resumed charge of the undergraduate department and
again taught, during the fall semester, a section of the elementary course from
which he had been relieved when elevated to his graduate professorship
(Boring, 1927, p. 500; Dallenbach, 1956, p. 173). Though attendance at his
lectures was restricted to sophomores, I attended them with his knowledge
but without his sanction. If I ever were to hear his lectures, it had to be then,
since I was coming up for my degree the following spring. He lectured twice
a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at II o'clock. He delivered his lectures
in an academic gown and precisely as the chimes sounded the opening hour
he appeared on the rostrum behind a desk heavily laden with demonstra-
90 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tional apparatus. He spoke extemporaneously without notes and closed his

summary just as the class bell sounded. I could see from whence Baird had
derived his form and style of lecturing.
With three researches to complete and write up, the undergraduate
courses I was attending, the observational hours I had to spend on others'
experiments, and the study that I was doing in preparation for my doctoral
examination, I found that Kulpe's students, whose dedication I had so greatly
admired, had nothing on me. Between pipe-smoking, which I had begun
the previous spring to keep me awake, and the elimination of breakfast, I was
able to carryon, bring my work to a close, and come up for my doctoral ex-
amination in early June of 1913.
Titchener advised me against spending the morning of the examination
in frantic study; he told me to get out of my room and spend the hours in
strolling leisurely through the gorges running through the Cornell campus.
This seemed to be excellent advice, for nothing could be accomplished during
that morning's study that could have any bearing upon the outcome. If a
candidate does not know enough to pass the examination without that study,
he will not be able to pass with it. I did, therefore, as he advised. As I walked
through the gorges, I kept asking myself questions that I could not answer,
and I had no means of looking up the answers. I believe that I would have
spent a less fretful and anxious morning in my room with my books, hence
I am not sure about the excellence of the advice.
My examination, conducted by the chairmen of my major and minors,
was opened by Titchener. To remove my tension, he began by asking ques-
tions about my early training-a procedure I have ever since followed in
conducting doctoral examinations so that the candidate would be put at ease
-turned to more and more searching questions, and then to my dissertation.
He had me explain its historical background, its object, procedure, results,
and their significance. He exhibited me, showing what he had accomplished
with me to the other members of the committee. He set the style of the exam-
ination. Kingsbury, chairman of my hrst minor, followed Titchener's example.
After general and specific questions about histology and embryology, he
turned to the research that I had conducted under his direction, namely, the
embryological age at which Nisel granules appeared in nerve cells. He had
me explain the methods and techniques used and the results obtained. I
found Nisel granules in the nerve cells of mice embryos at all the stages I
was able to examine. I was unable to solve that problem, hence the study was
not published. Whipple, chairman of the second minor, questioned me upon
the Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (1914) he had recently published
and the undergraduate courses that I had taken with him and then turned
to the study I had done under his direction CDallenbach, 1910; 1919).
Titchener began the examination promptly at 2 P.M.; Whipple closed
it as the chimes struck 6 P.M. It was the longest doctoral examination in the
history of the Cornell Department. When Whipple closed his questioning, I
KARL M. DALLENBACH 91

was excused, but due to the lateness of the hour I was not held in suspense
for long. I was called back and Titchener formally announced that the com-
mittee was recommending me for the Doctor of Philosophy degree. As I look
back upon that afternoon, it seems to me that the members of the committee
were more concerned in demonstrating what they had accomplished with me
than in examining me.
Titchener felt the obligation, as few directors of doctoral candidates do
now, of obtaining positions for his students. He secured the option of three for
me, among them being an instructorship at the University of Oregon, where
a man was needed to supervise the construction and equipping of a new
laboratory, something on the order of what I had done at Pittsburgh. I was
grateful for his efforts in my behalf, but not enthusiastic, as I was then flirting
with the idea of returning to Pittsburgh for an M.D. degree, fervor for which
was kept alive by my minor with Kingsbury. I thought Titchener would ap-
prove of that idea, but he did not. I had to go to Oregon, as he did not intend
to have his training and work with me wasted. I went to Oregon, remaining,
however, at Cornell the summer following the receipt of my degree to prepare
a paper for publication, which I had read at Titchener's seminary that spring
(Dallenbach, 1915). When I left Cornell my formal training was over, but
my career as a teacher and an experimental scientist, which had its roots in
1909 as Baird's assistant, was begun. What I did with this training, or, more
truthfully, what it did to me, is told in Boring's biography and shown by Mrs.
McGrade's bibliography, contributed to the Festschrift published in 1958
by colleagues in Europe and America to mark my seventieth birthday and
formal retirement (Boring, 1958; McGrade, 1958). Boring touched lightly
on my childhood and young manhood, and concentrated on my career in
psychology. Since space will not permit me to treat of both periods, I have
chosen to write fully of the formative years of my life and to omit the later.
Boring's biography ends with my retirement. What has come to pass
since then may briefly be brought up to date. I have served and am still serv-
ing the University of Texas on "modified service," the most enlightened sys-
tem of retirement that I know. It permits me to carryon: to teach, direct
graduate research, publish such articles and notes as I wish, edit The Amer-
ican Journal of Psychology, and, in addition, to enjoy the academic life and
environment. I am well and still vigorous and know of no better way of
passing my declining years.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Karl M. Dallenbach
The effect of practice upon visual apprehension in school children. J. educ. Psy-
chol., 1910, 5, 321-334, 387-404.
The measurement of attention. Amer. }. Psychol., 1913, 24, 465-507.
92 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The relation of memory error to time interval. Psychol. Rev., 1913, 20, 323-337.
The history and derivation of the word "function" as a systematic term in psy-
chology. Amer. J. Psychol., 1915,26, 473-484.
The measurement of attention in the field of cutaneous sensation. Amer. J. Psy-
chol., 1916, 27, 445-460.
Blindfold chess: the single game. In Studies in psychology; Titchener commemo-
rative volume. Worcester, Mass.: Louis N. Wilson, 1917.
The effect of practice upon visual apprehension in the feebleminded. J. educ.
Psycho!., 1919, 10, 61-82.
The place of theory in science. Psycho!. Rev., 1953, 60, 33-39.
l\.1adison Bentley: 1870-1955. Amer. }. Psychol., 1956, 69, 169-186.
Across the years with Boring. Contemp. Psychol., 1961, 6, 332-337.
(with A. L. Dillenback) The Dallenbachs in America: 1710-1935, St. Johns-
ville, N.Y.: Enterprise and News, 1935.

Other Publications Cited

Barr, M. W. Mental defectives, their history, treatment and training. Philadelphia:
Blakiston, 1910.
Boring, E. G. Edward Bradford Titchener: 1867-1927. Amer. J. Psychol., 1927,
38, 488-500.
---. The Society of Experimental Psychologists. Amer. ]. Psychol., 1938,
51, 410-421.
---. Karl M. Dallenbach. Amer. l- Psycho!., 1958, 71, 1-40.
Buhler, Karl. T atsacken und Problem zu einer Psychologie der Denkvorgange: I.
Ueber Gedenken, Arch. ges. Psycho!., 1905, 9, 297-365; II. Ueber Gedenken-
zusammenhange, Arch. ges. Psychol., 1908, 12, 1-23; III. Ueber Gedenken-
erinnerungen, Arch. ges. Psychol., 1908, 24-92.
Downey, J. E. Types of dextrality and their implications. Amer. J. Psycho!., 1927,
38, 317-367.
Geissler, L. R. The measurement of attention. Amer. J. Psychol., 1909, 20, 473-
529.
McGrade, M. C. A bibliography of the writings of Karl M. Dallenbach. Amer. J.
Psychol., 1958, 71,41-49.
Ogden, R. M. Oswald Kiilpe and the Wurzburg School. Amer. J. Psychol., 1951,
64,4-19.
Rife, J. M. Types of dextrality. Psycho!. Rev., 1922, 29, 474-480.
Titchener, E. B. The postulates of a structural psychology. Psycho!. Rev., 1898, 2,
449-465.
---. An outline of psychology. (3rd ed.) New York: Macmillan, 1899.
---. Experimental psychology: a manual of laboratory practice. I, i. Quanti-
tative experiments, student's manual. New York: Macmillan, 1902.
---. Experimental psychology; a manual of laboratory practice, II, i. Quanti-
tative experiments, student's manual. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
---. Experimental psychology: a manual of laboratory practice. II, ii. Quanti-
tative experiments, instructor's manual. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
Lectures on the elementary psychology of feeling and attention. New
York: Macmillan, 1908.
KARL M. DALLENBACH 93

---. Lectures on the experimental psychology of the thought-processes. New

York: Macmillan, 1909.
---. A text-book of psychology. New York: Macmillan, 1910.
---. A beginner's psychology. New York: Macmillan, 1915.
---. The term "attensity." Amer. J. Psychol., 1924, 35, 56.
Whipple, G. M. Manual of mental and physical tests. Baltimore : Warwick & York,
1914.
95
John Frederick Dashiell
BACKGROUND AND CHILDHOOD

The surname Dashiell is a Scottish misspelling of a French name-

which assertion is less a quip than an epitome of genealogy. Forbearers of
the family name de Chiel have been traced back at least to the year 1025 in
the Department of Leon. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a
Protestant generation Red to Scotland; and later one scion emigrated to Mary-
land's Eastern Shore, bringing with him his spelling of the name. (De-
scendants of his three sons spread westward through the states.) Two other
lines of ancestry of the present writer were the Scotch-Irish Montgomerys
(including the general of that name in the French and Indian and Revolu-
tionary Wars) and the Myerses who had been among the Dutch patroons in
New York State. Vocationally the more immediate progenitors numbered
fairly successful farmers, merchants, artisans, a shipbuilder, and ministers.
Born in Indianapolis in 1888 to John W. Dashiell, D.D., and Fannie S.
Myers Dashiell, I was the ninth of twelve children, among whom were to be
found the diversities of physique and of temperament to be expected of
siblings, with no extreme deviants. One child died following accidents. All
but one of the other eleven attended college; which fact implies that my
father and my mother were both idealistic and realistic. Father was a min-
ister in the Methodist Church, at one period serving as district superintendent
and for many years as treasurer of the Indiana Conference; and Mother was
an active officer in the Foreign and the Home Missionary Societies of that
church. Both parents were strong in their faith, but not literalists nor evan-
gelical nor pietistic. I found interesting reading-historical, archeological, hu-
manistic-in my father's library. My mother's reading chair was reserved for
her always, and, though she deplored excessive "novel reading," she kept up
with many sacred and secular works of fiction. In our family a book was a
suitable gift for any occasion.
Both Father and Mother were physically strong and vigorous. This ob-
viously determined the fact that my brothers and I were athletes, serving as
captains on varsity teams of basketball, baseball, and football. My daughter
and granddaughters are excellent swimmers, as well as high-grade students
97
98 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

and quite comely. Mother had been rather gifted musically, and we children
had our occasional "sings" about her piano; two of the sisters also played piano
and violin. As for myself I enjoyed membership in the glee club and in a
touring male quartet. One striking incident was revealing, I think, of per-
sonality make-up. In my middle forties and with no real reading knowledge
of music, I made so bold as to take up study of the cello. After exactly eight
months' intensive practice on that noble instrument I was startled one evening
to find myself the only cellist at rehearsal of the university orchestra-and we
were to work on Schubert's Eighth ("Unfinished") Symphony, a composi-
tion both movements of which assign the lead for substantial passages to the
cello. It was like looking over a precipice. But fate was kind. Somehow I did
get through that rehearsal without the grossest of blunders. What had I
done! Was it possible? Could I really play it (or even play at it), the music
that had enthralled me as a listener for so many years? Then upon stepping
out-of-doors I broke down and in a moment of exaltation found myself weep-
ing. Another incident of the same evening serves to exhibit that character-
istic duality of interests. Following the orchestra rehearsal I was to attend
a program of the Society of the Sigma Xi. I had been looking forward to this
with high interest. Some years earlier when elected to membership in that
scientific research society I felt that I had reached a significant milestone;
I was a scientist! My gratification was high a few years later when I was
elected vice president and chairman of Section I of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (1939). Yet, now, the particular
evening of which I was speaking found me for that one time almost indif-
ferent to all this. My prideful wooing of scientific facts had weakened for the
time before the allure of Euterpe.
This duality of interests in the sciences and the arts has continued, and
alongside my shelves of technical and academic psychology stands a library of
199 recordings extending back to some of Caruso, the Flonzaleys, T oscanini,
Melba, and others of such age and vintage. All of which serves to soften an
apparent opposition in ideals and programs that is obsessing educational Amer-
ica as of this date of writing. (Why the opposition: is it that man's propensity
to categorize then freeze the categories has invaded here too?)
Whatever the clinical psychologst mayor may not be inclined to make
of this, it is a fact that side by side with a lively interest in music, in my
own case there has been a lifelong impairment of hearing. An attack of
scarlet fever in infancy left an aftermath of total deafness in one ear and
partial deafness in the other. The impairment has always proved a handicap,
of course, with embarrassing episodes. But I will confess that occasionally I
found it convenient to exploit the weakness, as when I let inattentiveness
to teacher's instructions be passed off as due to my poor hearing. I will not
deny employing another "alibi" throughout the adult years: that of being an
absentminded professor. One or the other explanation often served as an
ever-present help in time of trouble. And, more seriously, I find it wise
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 99
and socially convenient to wear a hearing aid, and not too inconspicuously.
Also in regard to my psychological character, I realized that I was a clear
case of Binet's visile rather than audile, though such classification, we know
now, is not usually clean-cut. This point was impressed upon me when Dr.
McKeen Cattell asked if I could visualize the whole word "Constantinople";
and upon my claiming that I could, he challenged me to call out the letters
in backward order. That demonstrated to me the truth of one of Francis
Galton's cautious findings regarding imagery. Another but positive one was to
be found in my constant references to imaginal number forms. There is one
master form that has served me through the years for arranging many sorts
of serial materials-months of the year, children's ages, ancient and modern
centuries, and times of the clock. And for more complexly disposed materials,
what can be more absorbing than a map-any map!
I seem never to have been much intrigued by the supernatural or the
magical. At the age of ten or twelve years I did have a Hare-up of curiosity
about fortune-telling which ran, I think, the usual course. Astrology! Think
of it! To be able to read a person's fateful future by the positions of the stars
did seem to be an exciting quest. It is a matter of note, however, that I soon
found the signs of the zodiac, the individual stars and planets themselves,
eclipses and seasons and zones, and all the purely factual material so absorb-
ing on their own account that I soon forsook the original interest in horo-
scopes to bury my nose during school hours in my sister's college astronomy,
carefully screened behind my large geography. Is not this shift of interest
from the useful to the factual similar to that brought out in the simple
demonstration of growing children's changing definitions of words? A horse
to the youngest is "to ride on," and only later "an animal," "a quadruped,"
and eventually perhaps an Equus equidae. And on a more heroic scale is not
the history of a civilization to be marked as advancing from a preoccupation
with the practically useful to inquiries into the factually true?
This is as good a place as any at which to say clearly that I have never
felt any appeal in the disinterring of dead issues once assigned by scientists
to the limbo of disproven, rejected notions about nature or human nature-
telepathy, alchemy, astrology, clairvoyance, and the like-by these or by
other new names. Surely there is some limit beyond which open-mindedness
becomes credulity impelled by a Will to Believe. "ESP" and "PK" have, I
fear, been resorted to too often as if they were universal solvents for almost
any psychological problem. No, these notions have always left me quite cold,
in spite of thirty years of friendship with their exponents. Had I not in child-
hood been disillusioned with magical numbers, formulae, and abracadabra,
I wonder if I would have been made credulous by the odd circumstance that
my dissertation for the doctorate consisted of thirteen chapters, was submitted
on the thirteenth of the month, and led to my receiving the degree in the year
1913.
Twelve children of one family whose lives overlapped sufficiently to have
 100 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

afforded such memorable memories as of all twelve lining up after the Christ-
mas morning prayers in reversed age sequence before bursting into the parlor
to discover what Santa had left-those twelve would seem to promise interest-
ing material for group analysis. As it happens, however, the individual dif-
ferences, from Myers the eldest to Mary the youngest, an age span of but
twenty-one years, were not such as to arouse comment. "In-groups," "peck-
right hierarchy," "isolates," "deviates," and most of the concepts found useful
by the sociometrist or the group dynamics analyst would not have proved
especially useful in characterizing this family complex. Which is not to say
that the Dashiells found or made life humdrum; indeed one of us should
have been a story writer, for there was material! What is probably of more
present interpretative value is the nature of the parent-child relationships. If
a midpoint be struck between the extremes of authoritarianism and permis-
siveness, it is pretty certain that each parent in his handling of each of the
children varied but little from that midpoint. To be sure, there was a gradual
reduction in whatever austerity was shown the earlier-born children as the
later-born came into the family; but all twelve had reason to be grateful that
precept, praise, or punishment from either parent was, though definite, mod-
erated in degree. Always there was maternal and paternal affection, and it was
returned.
I had experiences relevant to psychology outside the family too. In
one city in which we lived an interesting parallelism could be seen between
the "territoriality" behavior so observable in many animal forms and an
unwritten law regulating gang and intergang behavior in humans. A boy
in ward X might visit a boy in ward Y; but he would do well to be circum-
spect and not dilatory, for upon departing he might find an aggressive pack of
Y warders at his heels with full and obvious intents. Yet once he had reached
the middle of the boundary street between the two wards he could saunter
as he pleased with no bully from Y to dare molest him.

EDUCATION

Indiana has always ranked high among the states of the Union in the
standards maintained in her public schools. I was fortunate, then, and doubly
so since both my parents regarded attending college as a matter of course,
even for children of a man in the poorly paid ministry. The college we at-
tended was not widely known-Moores Hill College, later to be moved to
and rechristened Evansville. Unquestionably the atmosphere I found was
more sectarian and a bit more monastic than it was contemporary-world
oriented; but I was fortunate in having at least two teachers who, though not
Ph.D.s, equipped me for pursuit of learning. The one, biologist A. J. Bigney,
secretary of the Indiana Academy of Science, lectured and directed his lab-
oratories with an infectious enthusiasm, the solid results of which I realized
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 101

in later years when I was to teach a year of zoology, and again when I
offered courses in physiological psychology and comparative psychology, the
latter being a favorite to this day. Also at college I had Charles E. Torbet who
was almost the opposite of Bigney in temperament; yet his careful and bal-
anced induction of students into literature and history was crucial in shaping
my permanent interests. The reading of the Victorian poets, especially Words-
worth, awakened new emotional insights and sympathetic perceptions in this
seventeen-year-old, thus dispelling a vocational choice of the law in favor of
philosophy and its not-yet-divorced partner, psychology. The other of Torbet's
fields, history, was absorbing too; and especially since I was privileged to
teach an ancient history class in the academy, or prep school of the college.
I obtained two bachelor degrees in successive years; one in science, the
other in literature. A bit unusual, indeed; but had not my father done this
years before at this same college? There was of course much overlapping of
these curricula. In the last spring I was lucky enough to win scholarships at
Columbia and at Harvard. (I understood that graduate schools were at that
time inclined to encourage more applicants from the smaller colleges.) The
choice presented me was of course an impossible one to resolve; thus I let
certain extrinsic factors decide for me, and I enrolled at Columbia.
My professors at Columbia University that first year (what a group of
Four Horsernenl) were Cattell, Woodworth, Thorndike, and Dewey. I,
newly come from a freshwater small college with no experience in seminars
or even in large lecture-halls, found myself at sea for a while; but as the
eminence of each man was matched by his reassuringly informed matter-of-
factness, loyalty replaced awe. And the meaning of "psychology," which I had
known within the generous limits of William James' rich Briefer Course
( 1892) studied at college, became now further expanded.
Cattell, with his quiet but pointed and purposeful ways of thinking,
his utter objectivity and preciseness and literalness in technical matters as
well as in personal relationships, was pushing the question of "how people
do differ, and on what these differences depend." Much influenced in gen-
eral by British thinking, Cattell was a strong Galtonian. I was one of the
fortunate graduate students whom he employed at quite adequate pay to
help in editing the third edition of his directory of American Men of Science;
and I was profoundly moved to find myself, in a later edition, rated with a
star by colleagues in my field. Cattell's interest in human differences, coupled
with a gift for dealing with practical affairs such as publishing, made him a
prophet well ahead of his times. He recognized that psychology need not be
limited to an academic-scientific area, but by making laboratory experiments
convertible into individual measures or tests, psychology could be applied
to practical affairs. Today of course it is difficult to believe that in 1910 the
director of Harvard's laboratories, Dr. Hugo Miinsterberg, could be bewail-
ing to a very young fellow like myself the public hostility aroused by the
tentative beginning in applied psychology put forth in his book On The
 102 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Witness Stand (1909). One of the permanent fruits of Cattell's leadership

in the opening up of applied psychology is seen today in the Psychological
Corporation. This organization has been one of the potent forces acting to
further but also to control the burgeoning profession of testing. Now, applied
psychology could have flourished in two quite opposite directions. The one
was quick popularization and rapid promotion of job opportunities in deal-
ing with the square-peg-square-hole manpower needs of industry, business,
individual-advisement, advertising, and so forth. The other direction was the
cautious, checked and rechecked research entries into such fields. I will not
forget a query heard in 1928: "Can you help me Iind an applied psychologist
who is also a sound scientific man?" Imagine having such a request nowadays;
the historical progress of applied psychology has been unquestionably in the
direction of the measured, the sound, and the sane. The spirit of Cattell
found kindred spirits in those of W. V. Bingham, D. G. Paterson, and others,
and in the alertness of the AP A Committee on Scientific and Professional
Ethics (on which I enjoyed serving for two different periods), as well as the
appropriate committees of state psychological associations, so effective be-
cause so firmly on the ground.
Another teacher of mine, Dr. R. S. Woodworth, who seemed so young,
was a most important director of the graduate student's work. His modest,
almost hesitatingly delivered, lectures in physiological and experimental psy-
chology furnished solid ballast for the advanced students' programs. The lec-
tures in the former subject were the basis for what soon was to be known
as the "Ladd and Woodworth" (1911). A full forty years later when I
offered a lecture course in physiological psychology at the University of Cali-
fornia at Los Angeles-with students second to none in motivation and in
competence- I found my Columbia course was a surprisingly solid pier from
which to throw a bridge to span that great time interval. In the experimental
laboratory, too, Dr. Woodworth's effectiveness was evidenced by the ovation
that greeted the announcement at a Columbia luncheon that "The Bible has
come out!" This is shown again by the fact that I, like others, learned to save
up problems of research until I could consult the (always youthful) Old Man.
E. B. Titchener's four-volume classic was not displaced (will it ever be?);
but a far broader recognition of experimental problems and methods was now
available in Woodworth's and later in Woodworth and Schlosberg's great
book.
The lectures of Dr. E. L. Thorndike in "educational psychology" puzzled
this callow new graduate student. His monumental three-volume text by that
name had not yet appeared, and the thin single volume available seemed to
run to columns of hgures, always figures. Where was the meat and juice of
human nature? But soon one came to recognize his working principle:
"Everything that exists or happens, exists or happens in some amount"; and
to see the compacted wisdom in "Correlation, not compensation, is the gen-
eral rule in human nature." The many easy generalizations about psychology,
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 103

teaching, learning, and other topics, I now came to realize and recognize for
what they were. It was fascinating for me to observe how, as soon as you
quantify a statement, you pull yourself up, you stop to look at things more
critically, and more precisely. What did it matter that Thorndike's talks were
not tailored to a neat course organization: what he had to say was invariably
pithy, arresting, and suggestive. Then when we read and discussed G. Stanley
Hall's Adolescence (1922)-a work surely at the opposite pole from Thorn-
dike's in subject matter and style-we appreciated our teacher's catholicity
and his utter fairness. Most grateful and delighted we were whenever he set
a question-and-answer hour, for then we found ourselves tapping unlimited
resources.
Ethics to an undergraduate at a church-supported college had tended to
have connotations and implications of superhuman authoritativeness, of uni-
versal sanctions and imperatives; and the language abounded in "oughts,"
"shalls," and "musts." But in the lectures of John Dewey the hearer found
himself a natural human being in a natural world. A key sentence quoted by
him (from Hobhouse or Westermarck) ran: "Social approval and disapproval
is the primary ethical fact." Many students were a bit baffied by Professor
Dewey's apparent casualness and even occasional absentmindedness. Some
were seen to be taking but few notes in meeting after meeting, then sud-
denly to catch an inspiration and to write furiously for the rest of the hour.
Similarly, I observed that in a logic seminar with Dewey, we thirty ardent
participants might debate for most of the two-hour period, then in the last
quarter hour hear suggestions from Dewey that led many of us to mutter on
leaving, "Wish I'd thought of it that way!" Dr. and Mrs. Dewey-she, a
person of considerable personality-held Sunday afternoon teas at which you
could count on meeting fascinating people of gown and town and diplomatic
renown.
Psychology in America in those days was largely in the German tradi-
tion that derived from the work of those physicists and physiologists who had
become interested in applying their methods to human beings- J. Muller,
Fechner, Helmholtz, and others. Thus, universities in America were rated in
psychology on the basis of their laboratories; and many of us graduate stu-
dents thought of the abnormal psychology of France and Germany (multiple
personality, Mesmerism, insanity, feeblemindedness, and so on)-if we
thought of it at all-as outre. One of our circle of graduate students now
famous for work in applied psychology warned the others of us that to dabble
in that stuff might make us just a bit "touched." When Wisconsin's Joseph
Jastrow came as a visiting professor to Columbia for a semester this indiffer-
ence toward human odds and ends as objects of serious study was punctured.
His fluent lecturing presented such material graphically enough to enlist our
curious interest. Even so, our research problems and seminars continued
largely in the experimental tradition.
Another whose writings did much to shape my intellectual develop-
 104 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ment was William James. Certainly, as Cattell had said, his two-volume
Principles of Psychology (1890) is the greatest single publication in psy-
chology, and of all time, I would add. Candidates facing a Ph.D. oral exami-
nation were advised to read the great classic. As philosopher-psychologist
Mary W. Calkins once declared, James' Principles is like the Bible, quotable
on just about any (psychological) topic. And through the years since hearing
that remark in 1911 I have time and again keenly realized its appositeness.
The $4.44 those two volumes cost me in 1909 is the best investment I ever
made, that's a surety! "The perceptive state of mind is not a compound" (p.
313). What better corrective for all the atomism and reductionism that has in-
sinuated itself into modern psychology, including the experimental! And the
James-Lange theory of emotion I have always held to be one of the most
illuminating insights in modern man's study of man, normal or abnormal.
Ah yes, you can find it inadequate; you can add here and take away there,
correct this detail and rewrite that phrase; but for setting the reader's thinking
in the right directions, it is inspired writ. Give me these two Jamesian ideas
and I could expand them into almost a complete psychology.
It is my lifelong regret that I never had an opportunity to meet Professor
James. I did have occasion to call at a home next door to his at the time the
APA was holding its 1909 convention in Cambridge, but James was too ill
to attend the sessions. I missed seeing the great man by that one doorknob.
One other of the Olympians whom I was never to have the privilege of
knowing was E. B. Titchener, whose interest in meetings was displaced from
the AP A to his own selected group, the Experimental Psychologists. (The
contemporary organization of that name continues the same scientific re-
search ideals but with far wider recognition of what subject matter truly is
"psychology.")
One more source of inspiration I hasten to acknowledge. For one of my
three years as a graduate assistant I was privileged to work with Frederick
J. E. Woodbridge, editor of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scien-
tifoc Method and lecturer in the history of philosophy. This class included
some of Columbia College's most brilliant students. Woodbridge lectured
three times a week; as his assistant I held small-group discussion sessions de-
voted to the philosophical or psychological classics named by the professor
to parallel his lectures. I lost no opportunity to attend those lectures, as did
some other graduate students, for Woodbridge's presentations were them-
selves classics. He would sketch in the origins and historic backgrounds; then
by presenting each man or system sympathetically, he taught us to seek
understanding from the inside out. When lecturing on Plato he was a thor-
ough Platonist, when on Descartes, a thorough Cartesian. I think the ardent
young student is all too eager to plunge into advocacies and polemics; and I
hold that to be derisive of another's field of study, be it philosophy, esthetics,
mathematics, advertising, or choreography, is a clear mark of immaturity.
That year's work confirmed my predilection for the historical approach, and
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 105

consistently I have preferred the history of psychology as my favorite teach-

ing subject.
An effective teaching device I early hit upon in such a course was the
constructing of a ceiling-to-Hoor chart by each student, with parallel vertical
columns for the proper dating of men and their books and researches as they
fall into the German, French, British, or miscellaneous traditions, and with
different colors of ink for notations of experimental, clinical, physiological,
theoretical, or other subject matter. One artistically gifted student embel-
lished his chart with truly excellent portraits. It is sometimes surprising how
much devices of this sort can lend reinforcement to the student's interest in
the essential subject matter itself and facilitate long-time retention. Query:
Why does not every college of liberal arts set up as one required course the
history of philosophy to be taught by wise, enlightened humanists who are
scientists and by scientists who are humanists with historical perspective?
My second choice as a teaching subject has pretty consistently been
comparative or animal psychology. My aforementioned work with college
courses in zoology, as student and as teacher, had made laboratory contacts
with animal phyla familiar and fascinating enough; and moreover the realiza-
tion dawned on me that many of the problems of behavior at the human
level could be dealt with in infrahuman forms and so much more simply,
suggestively, and revealingly. (And this is not as trite as it sounds.)
Though of questionable relevance at this point, I am impelled on two
counts to mention a family pet, a gentle Chihuahua. She had been obtained
in the desperate hope that friends' tales might have truth in them: that an
asthmatic patient is often benefited by keeping a purebred Chihuahua in
close physical proximity. Whether it be a matter of counterallergy or of
psychosomatics, my wife Thelma's long-time asthma has during these ten
years been strikingly relieved-and we are content to be pragmatic as to the
explanation. This pet appears legitimately in one photograph in the Amer-
ican Psychologist for 1959.
A second psychological observation prompted by this pet is a noticeable
gentling in my own handling of laboratory animals. I have never performed
any slightest surgery without anesthesia, of course, and I have done my share
of letting off-duty albino rats sniff and snuggle at my shoulder and neck; yet
I detect recently a more restrained handling of them-a generalization from
my handlings of the family pet. Indeed, I confess to qualms about the present-
day exploiting of «stress" problems in animal research by run-o-rninc stu-
dents. After all, I submit, intense fear, like intense pain, is evil; and I shall
never be able to forget that experiment reported at an AP A session some years
ago in which a tame rat had been actually frightened to its death by a vicious
gray rat introduced into the same cage "to provide a stress situation"!
My third choice of courses for teaching has been developmental or child
psychology. But only if the course be pretty strictly contained, that is, bio-
logically oriented and in the spirit of a natural science undistracted by too
106 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

many emotional, educational, and mental-hygienic considerations. To study

the human child dispassionately and objectively as a member of Homo sapiens
is surely the hrst approach to sound knowledge of the developing individual,
the beginning of wisdom. This is the truly scientific approach.
Let me add that there are certain other considerations that lead me to
be less actively and personally interested in the more useful and practical
courses in childhood to be found listed in college curricula. At times I have
found it disappointing to see what strikes me as an overplaying of a very few
favorite "explanations." So many and so interlaced are the contributing fac-
tors that determine a human being's actions, feelings, and thoughts at a given
juncture, that-as a cynic would put it-in any particular case you can always
find an Oedipal situation, some traumatic circumstance of weaning, a castra-
tion anxiety, an order-of-birth family pattern, or a too authoritarian or too
permissive handling in childhood. Which cme of these or other equally simpli-
fied formulas is applied to the case may represent the consultant's own indi-
vidual bias. Also, in many cases a freedom of interpretation is provided by
those ever-present helps in time of trouble: the mechanisms of projection,
identification, regression, and especially compensation. But to be fair, it must
be recognized that the clinician has many more variables to control than has
the experimentalist in his neat laboratory. All these and many others are of
COUIsevaluable weapons in the armament of the clinician.

TEACHING APPOINTMENTS
AND ADMINISTRATION

My first academic appointments provided me with variety. In 1913-14

I had the ponderous title of Professor of Education and Biology at Waynes-
burg College. The next year I served as an instructor in philosophy at Prince-
ton University and the next two years as instructor in philosophy and then
in psychology at the University of Minnesota. In the two academic years
1917 to 1919 I enjoyed teaching "pure" psychology at Oberlin College where
that discipline had already been separated from philosophy.
After receiving appointment at the University of North Carolina in
1919, I was permitted a year later to pull together the psychology courses
being taught in the Departments of Philosophy and Education to form an
autonomous Department of Psychology. Year by year additions to course
offerings and to staff were made under two guiding principles: that psychol-
ogy is basically a biological science and that accordingly there should be an
emphasis upon laboratory or other concrete work. In the very first two-term
introductory course I worked out appropriate experiments for the students
working in pairs, the experiments closely paralleling the lectures. The other
natural science departments, who were always conscientious about their own
offerings, welcomed psychology to their group. Indeed, our courses "1" and
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 107

"2" were made available as electives for discharging the college's natural
science requirement for the A.B. or B.S. degree. So far as I have been able
to learn, I can probably claim priority in the setting up of psychology as a
natural science with a full laboratory. The testimony of competent students
supported this approach to the field of psychology, and after a year's trial the
faculty accepted it. The plan continued, and has been established at a num-
ber of other institutions. Incidentally, assignment of selected graduate majors
to handle these laboratory sections offers invaluable teaching experience and
by the same token offers a useful basis for appraising the assistants as candi-
dates for professional appointments elsewhere.
Many years later, after statutory retirement at North Carolina, I was
given opportunity at Wake Forest College again to organize an independent
undergraduate Department of Psychology. There I had the friendly coopera-
tion of Dr. H. C. Reid, chairman of the philosophy department, who, having
once been a student of Titchener's, was handling the psychology work. He
was, however, now glad to be relieved of the psychology to devote full time
to his philosophical work and colleagues. It was a source of real gratification
that in the new Life Sciences building, the psychology department was in-
vited by the biologists to share generous space. I was glad to submit a list
of specifications of rooms and utilities. I was also further heartened by the
students' naming their psychology club for me.
But to return to earlier years and the University of North Carolina. Our
working quarters there were inadequate, and the need was recognized as so
imperative that in 1928 we were allotted a three-story building, New West.
This historic structure had been serving as home for an historic debating
society and a men's dormitory. Loyalty feelings on the part of "old grads" of
the society were not to be offended by razing the structure for replacement,
but a compromise was accepted. The society's assembly room was moved to
the top Hoor; the building was gutted leaving the four brick walls; and we of
the department were given carte blanche to have the architects and builders
pour inside that shell a new concrete building according to our specifications
(1930b). Thus were satisfied both sentiment and science. Having spent a
summer during my college years at blueprint work with Westinghouse in
Pittsburgh, I found this opportunity to design rooms, fixtures, and even spe-
cial furniture for New West one of the exciting occupations of my life. Be-
cause provision was made for animal research, the genial University Business
Manager dubbed the building a "mouse-o-leum," with no ghoulish implica-
tions. (As this is being written in 1964 the active department is acquiring
also the former botany-zoology building. But that is for others to tell.)
I should amend my account on earlier pages in which the natural science
orientation of the Department of Psychology was stressed. My emphasis was
due to the unusual nature of that characterization in the American aca-
demic world. In fairness I want to point out that psychology was rated as a
natural or as a social science at the University of North Carolina. Indeed, I
 108 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

am proud of the fact that for two decades many members of the social science
faculties had audited or had enrolled in courses in the psychology department,
most commonly the one in animal behavior or the one in neuroses and psy-
choses.
During my years as chairman the North Carolina department awarded
thirty-six M.A. degrees in psychology and twenty-five Ph.D.s. Of the ad-
vanced students at North Carolina I was frequently made proud by their
attitudes toward psychology. This was revealed well by their lively participa-
tion in seminars, with or without course credit. I can think of but three or
four out of the many institutions in which I have held appointments where
equal initiative and earnestness was manifested. Just for contrast I recall one
state university where my graduate class in learning voted to continue as a
lecture course rather than change to a seminar with optional reporting of
journal articles and books. Yes, those evening psychology seminars at Caro-
lina will always be vivid in recall!
In the early 1920's I was fortunate in the psychologists who accepted
appointments as colleagues: Dr. Harry W. Crane from Ohio State with a
strong medical background, Dr. English Bagby from the Yale department,
and Dr. Floyd H. Allport from the Harvard department. Bagby was soon to
publish his Psychology of Personality (1928), and Allport his trailblazing
Social Psychology (1924). In the 1930's renewed emphasis upon experi-
mental and statistical psychology was made possible by the appointments of
Dr. A. C. Bayroff of New York University and North Carolina, Dr. W. J.
Daniel of North Carolina, and Dr. R. J. Wherry from Ohio State. In the next
decade, after Wherry left to go to the Pentagon, Dr. Dorothy C. Adkins of
Ohio State took charge of the teaching of statistics and group testing and
published her book Construction and Analysis of Achievement Tests (1947),
then quite lately her Statistics: An Introduction for Students in the Be-
havioral Sciences (1964). Upon resigning the chairmanship in 1949 I fol-
lowed the unanimous counsel of the members of the department, and nomi-
nated her to the chancellor for the chairmanship. One of my last acts as
chairman was the nomination of Drs. Harold C. McCurdy, Irwin S. Wolf,
and James W. Layman to round out the personnel for training in personality
and clinical psychology. Dr. Layman formally organized a curriculum that
was later approved by the AP A. Excellent relations were soon cemented.
The "rolling stone" adage is peculiarly applicable here. One device to
prevent a teacher's becoming a "mossback" is to have faculty appointments in
different institutions. In that regard I consider my life as having been blessed.
After appointments at Princeton, Minnesota, and Oberlin, I became a fixture
at the University of North Carolina from 1919 on; but on leave I have used
opportunities to work summers or semesters at a number of institutions to
be mentioned later. The more interesting contrasts and comparisons, how-
ever, are not those to be drawn between different sections of the country,
but between the universities themselves.
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 109

In 1948 personal tragedy struck, when an unsuspected malignancy took

away my wife Sylvia. A sympathetic chancellor, R. B. House, recognized my
need of change of scene without disengagement from mental occupation,
and he permitted an arrangement which was, I would guess, unique in uni-
versity practice. Without any change in my faculty status or salary at North
Carolina nor any compromise of retirement expectations there, I was per-
mitted to serve as a visiting professor for one semester at the University of
California at Los Angeles and for another semester at the University of
Florida. My earnings at those institutions were directly transmitted to the
treasurer at North Carolina, and a thoroughly competent substitute for me
was thus provided in the person of Dr. Eugene R. Long, Jr., from the Uni-
versity of Virginia. The changes of scene afforded me intensive working
opportunities, not play vacations, under morale-bolstering conditions, and
neither university was handicapped. I will add that though this was a more
extreme departure from the usual static employment conditions, it did
strengthen my belief in the salutary effects on teachers and students of ex-
change professorships. Why not have more of them across the land?
A few words I must say about Sylvia herself. After graduating from the
same Indiana college two years after me, she had waited for me a third year,
teaching, while I worked at my Columbia graduate studies. Then when my
doctorate was clearly in sight, we married and lived for a year in the Big
Town, with its opera, Metropolitan and other museums, Broadway, its art
auctions (one sale including a Rembrandt), and other world-size fascina-
tions as well as the social life of a university. I recall that after my oral
examination I signalled Sylvia by entering our apartment sounding the
Triumphal March from Aida. And I want to add that Sylvia understood and
supported my professional hopes and ambitions. Besides being a willing sharer
in the trials and privations of the earlier years of my getting established pro-
fessionally, she continued warmly to back my aspirations; and I recall her
disappointment once when I declined being considered for the secretaryship
of the AP A. She took an active part in the home entertaining of my classes
and of the graduate psychology group, especially when visiting psychologists
were in Chapel Hill. Many will remember her alert sprightliness.

EDITORIAL DUTIES

Any inquiring reader knows the tremendous convenience of having

access to a file of reference volumes furnishing correct and complete topical
listing year by year or month by month of all psychological books and journal
articles. This service has been provided by the Publications Board of the
APA in the Psychological Index since 1894. A further boon to the reader
was furnished in 1927 in the form of authoritative condensations of the pith
and substance of each publication-the reader's first resort and ever-present
 110 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

help in time of need-the Psychological Abstracts. Under the editorial guid-

ance of Walter S. Hunter and R. R. Willoughby this service was extended
to cover all the material appearing anywhere in the world. Voluntary as-
sistance was enlisted from members of the Association, to each of whom was
then assigned books or the file of certain journals for immediate abstracting
and reporting back to the editors.
Now abstracting has always seemed to me a most rewarding exercise for
the abstractor himself-a challenge to get so much said or implied in so little
space and with objective fidelity. It was my privilege and real pleasure to
serve as one of the many cooperating abstractors for many years in the first
two decades of the Abstracts. I recall but one journal article too resistant to
my efforts: a doctoral dissertation that attempted to reduce maze learning
to changing patterns of flexor and extensor reflex thrusts-surely about the
nadir in reductionist theory!
Other much heavier editorial opportunities were to come my way soon.
In 1931 I was invited to become the consulting editor of the McGraw-Hill
Publications in Psychology.
The success of that series owed much to the already established prestige
of such authors as Kurt Lewin, N. R. F. Maier, J. P. Guilford, T. C.
Schneirla, Cliffort T. Morgan, Carl E. Seashore, S. Howard Bartley, Eliza-
beth B. Hurlock, and many others. Recognizing that this business of critically
reading the manuscripts of fellow psychologists who might as appropriately
be sitting in judgment on my books was a reflection calculated to keep me on
the qui vive. After nearly twenty years ( 1950) the pressure of old and some
new professional involvements persuaded me to resign this post. But I left it
with a feeling of indebtedness toward so many cooperative authors and with
memories of extremely happy associations I had been having with everyone
I had known in the publishers' offices. It had been easy for me to identify
with the company and to feel a bit of personal pride in that imposing office
building they erected on Forty-second Street.
A second editorial responsibility I assumed in the 1930's was that of
editing the Psychological Monographs, one of the official journals of the
APA. My tenure extended from 1935 until 1947. This post afforded me the
advantage of getting to know some of the liveliest research going-a matter of
gratification to one who was helping direct projects in his own laboratory
and trying to cover essentials of the field of psychology for presentation in
college textbook form. In one respect this post was a relatively easy one: the
vast majority of the manuscripts were doctoral dissertations that had passed
the critical reading and oral examinations of graduate departments and could
on their face be presumed to be acceptable. But there were exceptions. In a
few cases it appeared that a student's dissertation had been passed on the
strength of its literary presentation rather than as a contribution to human
knowledge on the subject. And in one case I remember with chagrin letting
my editorial scruples con he outweighed by the emphatically expressed judg-
ments pro of two full professors in a well known university.
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL III

Still a different kind of editorial work, as it too is called, involves not

judging of others' writings as such, but reworking and gathering into a single
form what others have written. I was asked to contribute eighteen articles
on psychology to the Encyclopedia Americana (1960 edition). This was an
opportunity like no other, for its execution would require the kind' of treat-
ment of subject matter combining a textbook's systematic order, a semihis-
torical perspective, an abstractor's getting at the heart of the matter-all rolled
into one. That my enthusiasm paid off is suggested by the words of a re-
viewer: "Dashiell writes with rare insight and illuminating clarity. His
[encyclopedia] articles ... form the most important contribution ... to
the coverage of psychology" (Metcalf, 1959). I slept well after reading that.
Summary surveys of lesser scope I was given opportunities to make in
later years, such as chapters in books edited by others-chapters on general
principles of behavior, general principles of learning, and the like.
A conscientious bit of field survey by library research I concluded for a
chapter in A Handbook of Social Psychology (1935a). I tried to make this
live up to its title, "Experimental Studies of the Influence of Social Situations
on the Behavior of Individual Human Adults." I had been asked to do this
by the book's editor, Carl Murchison, since I had published an experiment
in 1930 in which I carried further Floyd H. Allport's method of making
measured comparisons of what the individual can or will perform when alone
versus when he is in different sorts of social surroundings. My own specific
finding had been the modest one that when a working person is aware that
his start-stop signals are simultaneous with and under the same physical con-
trol system as are the other workers', even though they be in other rooms or
other buildings, his scores differ from those he makes when he is quite alone.
To have a true social situation then, the physical presence and proximity of
fellow men is not a sine qua non. The handbook chapter turned out as in-
tended, since I have had testimony from recent workers in relevant social
psychology that they have used it as a point of departure.
In a recent year I was asked to do another encyclopedia job, that of
providing an article or series of articles on the history of psychology. Nothing
would have given me a greater lift! What a keen disappointment then, that an
early publishers' deadline plus commitments I had made to 611 certain teach-
ing engagements made that impossible. It still has a place in my fantasies.

RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS

As mentioned earlier, in the first two decades of the twentieth century

the line of difference between philosophy and psychology was not heavily
drawn, either in the literature or in university departments and courses. (A
survival, albeit a vigorous one, is found today in the Southern Society for
Philosophy and Psychology.) For my master's degree I majored in psychology
and minored in philosophy, then for my doctorate switched the two. The
112 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1913 master's thesis was an attempt to bring out inconsistencies and inade-
quacies in the conception of a "social consciousness" of Schaeffie, Lilienfeld,
and others-a critical job done definitively later by Floyd H. Allport.
As a philosophy major I had come under the influence of both Dewey
and the New Realists; and my doctoral dissertation, "The Philosophical Status
of Values," was an examination of contemporary systems of value theory,
coming up with a presentation in nonsubjective instrumental terms.
After eight quite minor papers in philosophy, I published my first psy-
chological venture, a comparison of preferences among color-combinations
and among tone-combinations on the part of kindergarten children and col-
lege sophomores (1917). This was a study in what in those days was called
judgment. Although the trends of the collected data were in line with state-
ments of other investigators the study now can be seen to be poorly controlled
statistically. Historically viewed, the problem and procedure were illustrative
of methods to be used in experimental esthetics.
During my first year at Columbia I had had some opportunity to handle
white rats in a simple maze, in after-hours following work on Cattell's Amer-
ican l\len of Science. Later, my teaching at Oberlin brought me into close
association with Dr. R. H. Stetson, whose acuteness I was soon to recognize
and whose generosity to appreciate. He had devised a multiple-unit system of
constructing mazes that permitted the taking down and reassembling of the
wall sections in changing patterns. Together we adapted the idea to animal
mazes of different wall heights and runway lengths, and similarly, to child
mazes on a much larger scale. The very plasticity and adaptability of this
apparatus suggested a number of research problems with animal subjects
(1919). I was enabled 0) to exhibit higher and lower level (space) habit
hierarchies, (2) to compare the problem-value of different kinds of culs-de-
sac at side, straight ahead, and so forth, (3) to bring out prevalence of for-
ward over backward oriented running (with A. C. Bayroff, 1931b), (4) to
identify spatial habit elements readily transferable from maze to maze
0920a), (5) to prove animals' abilities to reroute themselves after having
been blocked, and (6) to observe variability in routing when no blocking has
been encountered.
One very minor study furnished an amusing lesson for my students.
Employing fairly simple mazes identical in pattern but of different sizes
accommodated to the experimental subjects, I found that the mean number
of trials taken by albino rats to learn it was 13 ± 5, while the score for
kindergarten children was 12 ± 4.
Incidentally, at that early stage (about 1915) of child psychology, many
a young Ph.D. was counselled: "pick out a few likely-looking tests from
C. M. Whipple's Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (1914), and apply
them to various groupings of children by age, sex, grade, nationality, or what
have you." Was this shotgun research? Trailblazing, rather!
If the old saw is true that politics makes strange bedfellows, it is equally
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 113

true that a lively spirit of inquiry ofttimes raises strangely different queries
and questions. The scientist or other investigator whose problems and in-
spirations grow out as so many sprigs from one single parent trunk is not
very far from mono-ideism. And though we customarily emphasize the devo-
tion of an inquiring scholar or scientist to his one area of intensive attention,
it is my belief that a psychologist biographer would find not only that varia-
bility and imagination are essential in creativity (a big word at the time of
this writing), but also that many-sidedness characterizes the interests and
personal involvements of most productive thinkers. Be that as it may, I find
in the sequences of research interests of myself and my students a rather
puzzling degree of noncontinuity, after due allowance is given the half-dozen
maze problems mentioned above growing out of exploiting a new technique.
Some of the various research problems to which we addressed ourselves were
as follows:
I. a comparison of complete vs. alternate methods of practicing two habits
(1920b)
2. the effects of practice upon two mental tests
3. psychological principles that bear upon (Wilsonian) internationalism
4. temporal vs. spatial sequences in learning multiple stimuli
5. an examination and restatement of the history of educational theory through
the centuries
6. some "racial differences" measured by the Will-Temperament Test
7. a physiological-behavioristic description of thinking and, later, the physiologi-
cal location of the seat of thinking (1926) (these have gotten into textbooks
as comparisons of the central vs. peripheral view of thinking)
8. a re-examination of urban vs. rural children with Binet and then Pintner-Pater-
son tests (with W. D. Glenn, 1925b)
9. a quantitative demonstration of animal drive (this found its way into ele-
mentary and some advanced texts, 1925c)
10. learning of inclined planes by rats (directly stimulated research elsewhere)
II. changes in psychomotor efficiency in a diabetic (I930a)
12. apparatus for measuring serial reactions (I 9 30c)
13. the objective nature of "intent" in legal usage
14. affective value-distances as a determinant of time taken to choose (with Sybille
K. Berwanger, 1937)
15. the role of vision in spatial orientation by the white rat (I959a)
16. monocular polyopia induced by fatigue (I 959b).
To such a listing of more and less related topics I should hasten to add
that my interest lay not in their disparateness; frequently I went on to urge
their relatedness. As described by a friendly editorial commentator, "The most
definite effect he [Dashiell] has had upon his students and upon other mem-
bers of his profession has been a tolerance for conflicting viewpoints and an
open inquiring attitude .... His writings have frequently emphasized the
synthesis and coordinations between different lines of psychological research."
If there be any truth in the quotation, an example is furnished in the paper
114 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I read before Section I of the AAAS in 1935, "A Survey and Synthesis of
Learning Theories" (1935). At that time the manifold theories of learning
were tending to be grouped into three general types: the trial-and-error, the
conditioned response, and the Gestalt types. Debates between the advocates
of these three were at times spirited; and, as is so often seen, vigorous advocacy
led to mental myopia and astigmatism, and to the either-or error. In my
analysis I set forth some eleven of the major emphases made by this or that
one of the three schools; then I canvassed the outstanding experimental re-
ports of all three to see whether such emphasized points might not actually
be found in the procedure and data of all three. To make a long story short:
they were!
Here is a convenient place to urge a very general historical considera-
tion, especially on the part of young readers. In the panorama of intellectual
history, suppose that a new insight or a new construction emerges. Then
later a newer insight or newer construction breaks through. Is the previous
one then discredited and dismissed? In most cases, no! It is eventually ab-
sorbed into the body of doctrines, and that in turn enriches it. For example,
the Gestalt movement of the early twentieth century may not be explicitly
at the center of attention with most psychologists of the sixties, but that is
precisely because the spirit of that movement has become absorbed into the
whole field of psychology. This is true also of the schools of structuralism,
functionalism, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis. And further, within any
large area of competing doctrines, such as the many psychoanalytic theories,
it is wisdom to expect to find interpenetration and cross-fertilization. The
history of psychology is not so much a story of acceptances-rejections as one
of adaptations, absorptions, and assimilations.
A writing effort that gives some substance to the statement that I was
more interested in tracing essential similarities than in exploiting differences
was my vice presidential address to this same Section I in 1939 entitled "A
Neglected Fourth Dimension to Psychological Research" (1940). Besides
present stimulus, habit, and genetic factors, it was pointed out that the human
being's responses are determined by his "set." More impressive polysyllabic
names were to be found for this in many time-honored experimental reports-
as on attention, reaction time, psychophysics, work curves, imageless thought,
inspiration, and many more-but it had not previously been isolated for full
recognition. A few months after my address some direct studies on "set" did
appear in the journals and with that word in the titles.
But a more sweeping sort of reconciling of oppositions and differences
had urged itself on me for my presidential address before the American
Psychological Association in 1938. The time was ripe for some such effort.
In fact, one of the more colorful oldsters of the Association was having much
to say about "the threatened dismemberment of psychology." At the time of
that convention, then, centrifugal forces were much in evidence. The re-
searches being reported were, of course, more and more about less and less:
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL ll5
specializations magnifying differences. A clear symptom of this divisive
Zeitgeist had been displayed in the organizing of an American Association of
Applied Psychology, its membership drawn almost completely from that of
the AP A. (This splinter-grouping ended when the AP A was reorganized less
than ten years later.)
There were other disjunctive forces at work also. "There goes Doctor X:
what's he?" Such a query was to be overheard from almost any group of
students. It was an indoor sport to sort and classify psychologists. There can
be no question that this was a consequence of preoccupation with the great
schools of psychology: structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, Gestalt, and
psychoanalysis. Predictably enough, partisanship developed.
And so it seemed fitting at that moment of psychological history in
America that for one evening attention be directed to harmonizing trends,
trends toward more mutual understanding and more cooperative effort. A
number were pointed out in this presidential address (1939). The following
are some relationships to the mother, philosophy:

1. The two-thousand-year-old divorcement of mind from body was still preoccu-

pying some Wundtian psychologists; and it was high time that such a dualistic
split be recognized for the irrelevance that it was.
2. Modern psychology's ardent espousal of scientific method had recently o'ershot
the mark in disavowing any relation to philosophical disciplines; but method
is logic, is philosophical.
3. More specifically, operationism, enunciated first by physicists, had been re-
cently adopted as a principle of rigor by a number of experimenting psychol-
ogists.
4. Another new methodological emphasis was Hull's upon postulates and deduc-
tions therefrom.
5. Then there had appeared Lewin's topological envisagernent of psychological
relationships; and meanwhile a reemphasis upon the individual as individuaL
6. Psychology in the 1930's was also developing more rapport with biology as
shown by Tolman's redescription of animal and human behavior in purposive
and molar instead of mechanical and molecular terms.
7. Several of the older concepts of biology were being dusted off and given new
piquancy and relevance to psychology. The heredity-environment dichotomy
was being dedichotomized, e.g., when do environmental factors first come into
play?
8. The Spencerian concept of adjustment had for some years been adopted and
made basic in mental hygiene and abnormal psychology.
9. But now this concept was projected on a still greater canvas, that of homeo-
stasis or organismic regulation. Indeed, certain of our elementary textbooks are
stilI presenting it as a basic concept to tie together all the various aspects of
psychology.
10. The biological concept of emergence also has been of great value to psychol-
ogy, for it serves to show that sudden inspirations, insights, and creativity are
natural events in a natural world.
116 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

On the other hand I was finding myself in those years caught up in

certain more major problems of research, especially the last two listed on a
preceding page as (15) and (16), both on vision.
At the International Congress of Psychology meeting at New Haven in
1929 I presented reports on three of the studies just mentioned. One, which
seemed to be quite favorably received there, may be worth a further word,
not only for whatever intrinsic interest it may furnish the reader but also
because it serves to illustrate a general point about research activity in gen-
eral: namely, that a fruitful subject of inquiry has often popped up quite
incidentally to the investigators' primary concern. I happened to be inter-
ested in the question of whether an animal when facing many alternative
paths all leading eventually to the reward (positive reinforcement) would
tend to follow walls, or take more bee-line or crow-By directions, or take some
intermediate course. A rat maze with an open-alley multiple-choice design
was constructed which would permit travel from entrance to exit via as many
as twenty criss-crossing and equal-length alternative routes. There was much
theoretical importance to the outcome. At that date there had been consid-
erable use of the ultrasimple S-R description of learning as involving the
sensory stimulations which the organism receives while it traverses a pathway
becoming associated with the motor responses it then makes; and the habit
as a whole being conceived as a learned sequence of S-R's. Nothing of the
sort occurred in our laboratory! In a sequence of runs from entrance to exit,
the animal was commonly observed to vary its routing, sometimes running
unhesitatingly down certain sections of pathways it had never entered pre-
viously (i.e., with nonidentical stimuli in operation). The report of these
findings (l930d) we may fairly consider to have been one of the crucial
experimental refutations of the doctrine that behavior reduces ultimately to
patterns of S-R's or of reHex arcs, a beautifully simple conception while it
lasted! (This report attained the dignity of a monograph.)
I should mention one more bit of research, and this one too because it
combines a question that is interesting on its own account with another
question of vastly greater import (1959b). From the age of eight or ten years
and throughout my life I have observed a phenomenon that is nowhere re-
ported in the journals and that, to my dismay and disgust, is challenged by
some authorities in a relevant field. It is as follows: after any prolonged
bout of reading or other intensive eye work I see more than the one image;
I see the object as partly duplicated. Importantly, this is true of each eye and
is not the everyday experience of seeing double that anyone with binocular
vision can report. To my astonishment I find both practicing and teaching
oculists and ophthalmologists who have never run across this phenomenon
following eye work; and a dean of ophthalmology in a western state university
has challenged the reported experience, that is, of accessory images resulting
from eye fatigue. They are unable to explain it in terms of what they know
concerning the eye's refractive mechanisms. This skepticism is not shared by
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 117

all these "eye men," however, and I have the positive supporting testimony
of certain psychologists, including physiological psychologists and sensory-
introspective psychologists, who are of recognized authority, including S.
Howard Bartley, S. Smith Stevens, and F. Nowell Jones. What an interesting
scientific dilemma is posed! Has our skeptical reaction against conscious ex-
perience as a source of scientific knowledge carried us so far overboard that
we are to repudiate any subjective evidence of a process, event, or change,
until we can demonstrate a parallel physical process, event, or change?

TEXTBOOKS

It is a practice in many university psychology departments for every

member of the staff to have charge of at least one elementary psychology
class in every two years, for example. I suppose there is a double reason in
this. For one: perhaps there is no academic subject which for its very first
presentation demands breadth of background and mastery and authoritative-
ness in the same degree as does psychology. It is not the intrinsic difficulty of
the subject, for one can think of other academic disciplines calling for as
close application and as frequent reviewing; rather it is because of the variety
of directions of approach and especially the many different points of contact
with everyday life at which the student can readily go astray. Then again,
for the professor's own sake it is to be recommended that he frequently come
down from his ivory tower and keep his narrowed research visions oriented
and articulated with trends in knowledge as a whole. For whichever reason,
many professors have never lost their interest in the introductory courses. And
I want to be counted with that company.
As a young teacher my attention went to the textbooks themselves.
James' Briefer Course (1892), on which I had cut my milk teeth, I re-
adopted along with others in some of the early years of teaching the intro-
ductory course. J. R. Angell's text-even when taught by a professor named
Lord (a standard Columbia undergraduates' pun, not mine i=was solidly
established in the predominantly functionalist institutions of America. Clear
and masterly (the author was later president of Yale), it was a pleasure to
teach, that is, to lecture alongside it. Nor was it completely supplanted by
the Woodworth introductory text appearing in 1921.
It was in the year 1912 that two new understandings of human hows and
whys, the behaviorist and the Gestaltist, were brought to psychology. The
behaviorist insight arose in the work being done in laboratories at Petrograd
(Pavlov) and Moscow (Bekhterev), and was then presented forcefully in
this country by Watson; Gestaltism originated in work at Frankfurt and Ber-
lin (Wertheimer, Kohler, and Koffka). The impact of Gestaltism was to hit
American psychologists a little later. But Watson's virile presentation of
behaviorism had its prompt appeal to the younger men of American psy-
 118 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

chology; and I was swept along. In truth I had been "softened up" when
majoring in philosophy at Columbia by the prevailing antisubjective New
Realism there. It came to be an ambition of mine to bring out an intro-
ductory textbook in this behaviorist direction, even following it out further.
As an "objective" psychology (Bekhterev's term) it could properly include
the nonsubjective physiological material of psychology that was not properly
"behavior." At the other extreme it could deal further with the intellectual
processes, especially by adapting and exploiting the Harvey Carr-Walter
Hunter "symbolic processes" brought into the light in their delayed reaction
experiments and the fresh and simple treatment of "perception" in Stevenson
Smith and Edwin R. Guthrie's Generol Psychology in Terms of Behavior
(1921). Accordingly I named my textbook, published in 1928, Fundamentals
of Objective Psychology.
Consistent with the atomistic and reductionist ways of thinking pre-
vailing in those first decades of the century (and before?), the organization
of my textbook proceeded by first describing rellex behavior and sensorimotor
arcs, though not to the extreme of some of the then current psychology and
neurology texts which furnished page-long lists of the reflexes of man out
of which his living and moving as a person was to be compounded. The long
accepted S-R formula was adopted; but one chapter was given to making
explicit "modifications and amplifications" of that formula, and another to
the integration of such action units (a la Sherrington). With such a machine-
like framework the problem of what makes it operate so as to move and act
like a living being became a real problem. There was little to go on in the
textbooks or other systematic writings, little that could be described in com-
pletely objective terms. Some promise appeared in the "drives" of the animal
psychologists; but too often these seemed verbal and not taken far enough
back to their physical origins in identifiable "matter." I was insistent upon
going all the way back and identifying tissue conditions within the organism
which gave rise to intra-organic stimulations which excited the organism to
overt activity. My persistent demand was for bodily-identifiable bodily-
tissues. Hunger served as a simple model. Instead of attributing the activity
of a person who seeks food to his "instinct of hunger" we could see the start
of the business in the physically recordable contractions of his stomach when
empty, as by balloon and by x-ray. Similarly it did not require extreme in-
genuity to find experimental physiological demonstrations of the needs of
other bodily tissues as initiating other types of "motivated" activity. One more
link in this story: when the organism in its activity came upon a situation
(as food) in which the tissue demand ceased, then the said activity ceased.
All of this, to be sure, was in the making in the mid-1920's, but I am sup-
ported by others who agree that it had not been as completely and clearly
formulated, not so well based upon demonstrated tissue-needs as in my
Fundamentals of Objective Psychology.
The book was well received by teachers of psychology. I was satisfied
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 119

by the degree to which it extended the application of objectivism; and ap-

parently it was teachable. After this has been said, however, I must add a
comment. When teaching this or any other behaviorist text I found it sensible
and fair to address my students thusly: "Now, we know that after all our
interest in psychology is an interest lots of times in how we and other people
feel or have enthusiasms or how our thoughts come and go. That is human
nature, too!" Then I gave them more traditional material. And I frequently
found it clarifying for them to hear the snatch facetiously quoting a Christian
Scientist:
Said credulous mistress O'Neil:
"Though I know that pain isn't real,
When I sit on a pin that punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel."

Nine years later a second textbook was issued by me with a change of

title to Fundamentals of General Psychology to permit change of contents to
include subjective or phenomenological approaches to many topics.
Naturally there were other changes of emphasis reflecting the changing
times. "Growth" of the individual had become "development," as the or-
ganismic, even the homeostatic, concepts came into greater use. Not unre-
lated to that shift of emphasis was the consolidation of the gestalt (now
spelled with a small "gH as befits coin of the realm) correctives of atomism
and reductionism. The motivated organism was now interpreted by prin-
ciples of life as much as by principles of machinery and indeed by principles
that are also biosocial. Further, it is true that our psychology must continue
to be basically and in its methods a natural science; but also it should be
addressed toward questions that are intrinsically human and humane. In my
efforts to represent the current thinking of psychologists, I was indeed grate-
ful for almost daily consultations with Dr. A. G. Bayroff. That this general
textbook as well as my other work was in line with American psychology of
the times, I took to be indicated by my election to the presidency of the
APA in 1938.
Twelve years later I attempted a textbook resurvey of psychology with-
out change of title for the new crops of college sophomores. There had been
no revolution in basic theory, viewpoints, nor systematic terminology. But the
experiences of war years had widened psychologists' ken in applied direc-
tions. most emphatically in clinical study of individual deviates.
From the first it has been one of my credos that to study human nature,
just as in studying any other nature, the student should study it, not merely
words about it. If he be given textbooks about man and his behavior, let him
also have guidance in observing that behavior and in experimenting with
it. In this faith we teachers of the introductory classes at North Carolina
drew up mimeographed directions for each week's laboratory session. or-
ganized about the conventionally accepted sections: problem, materials and/or
 120 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

subjects, procedure, results, discussion, and references. Then, after some years
of revisions and rewritings, the whole collection of sixty instructions was
brought out in book form in 1931 as An Experimental Manual in Psychology
issued by the same publishers as brought out my texts then and later, the
Houghton l\1iffiin Company, whose conservative handling of all matters as-
sures correctness in procedures and in details. We have not attempted revi-
sions of this manual; it is almost a universal preference of laboratory men
that they work out their own mimeographed sheets of instructions.

OTHER PHASES OF LIFE

Of academic experiences with "pure" psychology I seem to have had my

full share. Though continuously a member of one (North Carolina) faculty
since 1919, I have enjoyed earlier and interim appointments of a term or
more at twenty-two different universities and colleges. To mention a half of
them, east to west, will suffice for the picture: Clark, Rochester, Princeton,
Oberlin, Duke, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, Wyoming, Oregon, Southern
California, and California at Los Angeles. It would be fun to hazard specific
comparisons, of course, but so gratuitous! In certain departments emphasis
is more on experimental, in some it is theoretical, others emphasize clinical;
some are better equipped for advanced courses; at one institution all the
students seemed lacking in any sense of humor as reported by other visiting
professors as well as me; at another they were (all) excessive workers; and
I could go on. Differences of psychology faculties, too, are easily recognizable
along various dimensions. A most tempting field for surveying, yes; but not
for genetic nor historical purposes.
For all that, my peregrinations have not been extensive geographically.
l\1y only trips "abroad" numbered two in eastern Canada at the times of
psychology conventions, two in western Canada, a four-day visit in the
Hawaiian Islands, a two-day tour of pre-Castro Cuba, and a ten-day sight-
seeing tour of Mexico. All were fascinating. Two of these trips were espe-
cially valuable for their object lessons in social psychology. A sojourn in
Honolulu and Hilo afforded opportunity to observe an absence of race bar-
riers. A gracious and gifted teacher I met there turned out to be part Hawaiian,
part Chinese, and part Irish. In those islands the term "native" is as likely
to connote aristocracy as any lower status. In Mexico, again, the stereotypes
"lazy," "dirty," and "mean looking" that one picks up from "greaser-baiters"
near the border simply were totally inapplicable. I could relate incidents quite
in line with a Canadian psychologist's and a Florida psychologist's warm
praises after extended residence in Mexico by each. A particular instance that
speaks volumes was related to me by the latter, who often spent a whole
summer in this or that Mexican village, just living among the people there.
Discovering that in one of his villages there was no law-enforcing official,
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 121

he was moved to inquire what in the world they do with a fellow who might
attempt to steal a burro or a wife or a purse of pesos. He received this answer,
"Oh, we lead him down to the village square; and then we all stand around
him and laugh at him!"
The story of psychology in America is, of course, for the major share of
it an academic story, though the last two decades have witnessed an impres-
sive flowering in the many clinical directions and areas of application. What
is more, for me psychology has been limited to the non applied or "pure." My
defects of hearing aforementioned barred active participation in either world
war; though I served as a member of a sedentary Washington committee im-
posingly named Expert Consultants to the Secretary of War. My closest in-
direct experience with the physical fighting in World War II was through
my son, Frederick Knowles (,'Dick") Dashiell, who though in his middle
thirties and with a family, was a volunteer "combat-correspondent" front line
sergeant with the Marines throughout the Iwo Jima campaign. Later (through
marriage to Mrs. Thelma Hill Smith) I retroactively got other vivid second-
hand contacts with combat through her two sons. One, Donald M. Smith,
Jr., of the Coast Guard, had survived an explosion, sinking, and a day of
being "lost" after the Omaha Beach landing; and the other son, Adrian W.
("Duke") Smith of the Navy, narrowly survived a Japanese kamikaze dive-
bombing. Now for a note of lighter vein. After the war Adrian was married
to my daughter Dorothy Ann; then some months later I was married to his
mother, thus making him both my stepson and my son-in-law, also making
my daughter my stepdaughter-in-law, Other changes in stating this factual
matter are readily apparent, and they make it a fertile conversation piece.
This daughter incidentally had once consented to serve as the subject in a
picture in the third (1949) edition of my textbook representing (in a strained
posture) the use of a serial exposure apparatus.
And now, in no spirit of levity, let me say that these later years of life
with Thelma have known an unhurried, unworried, gay, well-oriented se-
renity-even through illnesses-such as I would wish to be the lot of other
senior citizens. One factor in this was a girlhood spent happily as a general's
daughter in the heart of Wilsonian Washington and also as a nurse in train-
ing, while another is an undemonstrative devotion to her Church. There
has been a contrast between our Lebensanschauungen, mine being of course
the scientific and academic, hers the business, military, and political: we do
not debate questions of religion nor of politics. I am often reminded of the
familiar Browning passage beginning, "Grow old along with me ... "; for it
has acquired enrichment of meaning.
My son Dick is now assistant director of press and radio for the National
Educational Association. His elder son is teaching mathematics at the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley. My son-in-law "Duke" is on the board of
directors of Hickey-Freeman. It seems a pity that comments on the academic,
artistic) personality, social, and athletic achievements of most of my grand-
 122 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

children and step-grandchildren would be out of place in a scientific and pro-

fessional autobiography!
Was it the inheritance of an energetic constitution from my father and
my mother or the result of stimulating opportunities? Whatever the inter-
pretation, the remarks of some students and associates were to the point; and
in the 1920's and 1930's I was a "glutton for activity." These activities in-
cluded: organizing a new department; working out all details, lecture and
laboratory, for the two-term introductory course; trying out courses I had
neither studied nor taught before (abnormal, legal, industrial); sketching out
all pre-blueprint details for a new psychology building, including animal
laboratories; conducting or directing my own and advanced students' re-
searches, including three of mine leading to papers for the International
Congress; serving as chairman of local chapters of Sigma Xi and of the Amer-
ican Association of University Professors; twice serving on the advisory com-
mittee to the University president; taking up study of the cello; serving on
a church committee; purchasing and remodeling a twelve-room home; hold-
ing on-leave appointments at universities from East to West Coasts; serving
twice on the AP A council, and twice as chairman of APA's committee on
ethics. It has been a full life, and I am grateful.
Any professional man has memberships in "learned societies" -national,
regional, and state. They do, of course, furnish some of the sources of his
motivation, and they constitute some of the media and environment in which
he works. I will take space for naming only those in which I happen to have
held office. In chronological order they are:

Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, president, 1925

American Psychological Association, president, 1938
Society of Experimental Psychologists, chairman, 1938
American Association for the Advancement of Science, vice president and chair-
man, Section I, 1938
North Carolina Psychological Association, president, 1959
North Carolina Academy of Science, president, 1960
Southeastern Psychological Association, president, 1961.

Of the APA annual conventions, I can recall attending thirty-three, and

finding inspiration at thirty-three.
Even in a matter-of-fact survey of his professional life one finds it im-
possible not to recognize that in some measure his morale and dedication has
been partly maintained by feedback tokens he had received from students
and from colleagues. I am reminded of them daily as my eye or mind's eye
falls upon so many things: a pair of all-silk-and-lacquer vases brought over
from Foochow, a Kreisler album with heartening inscription, a gasoline-
propelled miniature airplane-on-leash, a framed parchment from a student's
psychology club given my name, a sterling carving set, a combination gold-
lettered leather briefcase and handbag, a complete desk set of blotter and
JOHN FREDERICK DASHIELL 123

many pieces in brass and gold-stamped leather, a scalloped sterling serving

tray bearing thirty-three facsimile signatures, a tooled-leather billfold from
Egypt, and (in my study) a full-sized heavy photograph of a bronze wall
plaque that is mounted in the psychology building at Carolina, fashioned by
Dr. H. C. McCurdy's son John who had been commissioned by eighty-three
friends-the sculpture faithfully portraying my pleasure in handling a speci-
men of Mus norvegicus albinus.
Finally, I was presented the Gold Medal Award for 1960 from the Amer-
ican Psychological Foundation annually struck "in recognition of . . . long
devotion to Psychology as a science and as a profession"; and on the parch-
ment accompanying the medal, testimony to the generosity of spirit of my
professional colleagues, for there it is inscribed: "inspiring teacher, lucid
writer, ingenious investigator, able administrator, and genial friend." To
quote a favorite author, Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Call him not old, whose visionary brain

holds o'er the past its undivided reign.

REFERENCES

Selected Publications by John Frederick Dashiell

Children's sense of harmonies in colors and tones. ]. expo Psychol., 1917, 2, 466-
475.
(with R. H. Stetson) A multiple unit system of maze construction. Psychol. Bull.,
1919, 16, 223-230.
Some transfer factors in maze learning by the white rat. Psychobiol., 1920, 2,
329-350. (a)
A comparison of complete versus alternate methods of learning two habits. Psy-
chol. Rev., 1920, 27, 112-135. (b)
A physiological-behavioristic description of thinking. Psychol. Rev., 1925, 32, 54-
74. (a)
(with W. D. Glenn) A re-examination of a socially composite group with Binet
and with performance tests. ]. educ. Psychol., 1925, 16, 335-340. (b)
A quantitative demonstration of animal drive. ]. comp, Psychol., 1925, 5, 205-
208. (c)
Is the cerebrum the seat of thinking? Psychol. Rev., 1926, 33, 13-29.
Fundamentals of objective psychology. Boston; Hough ton Miffiin, 1928.
Variations in psychomotor efficiency in a diabetic with changes in blood-sugar
level. J. comp, Psychol., 1930, 10, 189-198. (a)
The new psychological laboratory at North Carolina. J. expo Psychol., 1930, 13,
217-219. Cb)
Some simple apparatus for serial reactions. J. expo Psychol., 1930, 13, 352-357. Cc)
Direction orientation in maze running by the white rat. Compo Psychol. Monogr.,
1930, 7, No. 32. Cd)
An experimental manual in psychology. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1931. (a)
124 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Fundamentals of general psychology. Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1937; revised,

1949.
(with A. G. Bayroff) A forward-going tendency in maze-running. ]. compo Psy-
chol., 1931, 12, 77-94. (b)
Experimental studies of the influence of social situations on the behavior of in-
dividual human adults. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A handbook of social psychol-
ogy. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univer. Press, 1935. 1097-1158. (a)
A survey and synthesis of learning theories. Psycho1. Bull., 1935, 32, 261-275. (b)
(with Sybille K. Berwanger) Affective value-distances as a determinant of esthetic
judgment-times. Amer. }. Psychoi., 1937, 50, 57-67.
Some rapprochements in contemporary psychology. Psychol. Bull., 1939, 36, 1-24.
A neglected fourth dimension to psychological research. Psychol. Rev., 1940, 47,
289-305.
The role of vision in spatial orientation by the white rat. ]. comp, physiol. Psychol.,
1959, 52, 522-526. (a)
Monocular polyopia induced by fatigue. Amer.]' Psychol., 1959,72,375-383. (b)

Other Publications Cited

Adkins, Dorothy C. Construction and analysis of achievement tests. Washington:

GPO, 1947.
---. Statistics: an introduction for students in the behavioral sciences. Colum-
bus, Ohio: Merrill, 1964.
Allport, F. Social psychology. Boston: Houghton Milllin, 1924.
Angell, J. R. An introduction to psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1918.
Bagby, E. Psychology of personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1928.
Hall, G. Adolescence. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1922.
---. Psychology: briefer course. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
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James, W. Psychology: briefer course. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
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Ladd, G. T. & Woodworth, R. S. Elements of physiological psychology. (Rev. ed.)
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l\1etcalf, J. T. Psychology in the encyclopedias. Contemp. PsychoZ., 1959, 4,
97-105.
Miinsterberg, H. On the witness stand. New York: Doubleday, 1909.
Smith, S. & Guthrie, E. R. General psychology in terms of behavior. New York:
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Whipple, G. M. Manual of mental and physical tests. Baltimore: Warwick and
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York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.
125
James J. Gibson

I was born in 1904 in a little river town in southeastern Ohio. The

Muskingum Valley had been settled very early by New Englanders. The
Indians had long since disappeared, but arrowheads still turned up in the
spring ploughing, and my father had a large collection. A river town, with a
dam and a water-powered mill smelling of grain, is a memorable place for a
small boy.
My mother taught all the grades in a country school until she married
my father. He had learned to be a surveyor for railroads after a couple of
years in college. Soon after I began school, his job took him into raw new
country in the West. His family went along; only after some years in the
Dakotas and Wisconsin did we settle down in a suburb of Chicago. By that
time, at the age of eight, I knew what the world looked like from a railroad
train and how it seemed to flow inward when seen from the rear platform
and expand outward when seen from the locomotive. The son of a railroad
man had a better opportunity than others in those days to see things: saw-
mills, mines, ore-boats, mountains, canyons, deserts, rivers, viaducts, tunnels,
and the geometrical wonder of steel rails tracing an even path over a wrinkled
earth.
By the time I was fully settled in school I had two younger brothers. We
lived within walking distance of Lake Michigan. But I never learned to be
a swimmer; I had rather climb trees, and I conquered a whole grove in the
backyard with my brothers. But they were four and eight years younger; I
was something of a solitary youth and I had few outside friends until nearly
through high school. There, at the age of sixteen, my entry into social life
was provided by a teacher who cast me in a play. I was a wicked courtier.
I delighted in acting. For the next twenty years I sought every oppor-
tunity to tryout for parts in the "little" theater. Amateur players are a spe-
cial fraternity, I think, with peculiar ego-needs, and my proudest moments
have been obtained on the stage. The achieving of a dramatic role, the
expressing of a character, has given me deeper satisfaction than the playing
of any of the other roles that an academic career affords-or the military,
scientific, professional, or administrative roles. Wherever I have lived, the
North Shore, Northwestern University, Princeton, Smith College, and Cor-
127
 128 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

nell, the amateur theater has made a bridge between college and community
and across disciplines, and those who are addicted to it, as I was before I
became deaf, are persons to my taste.
The only thing I remember learning in high school was Euclidean
geometry. The beauty of geometrical insight and geometrical proof made
a lasting imprint on my thinking; I recall asking the teacher whether every
theorem that was true could be proved true. After secondary school I went
to Northwestern for lack of any other planning of where I might go to col-
lege. It was just down the lake shore, and I could commute from home.
In 1922 I transferred from Northwestern to Princeton (which strangely
would accept a Midwestern sophomore without much Latin, but not a fresh-
man) and found myself out of place again except among the little theater
enthusiasts. My friends in college were the eccentrics instead of the club
members. I had no idea what I wanted to do or be, choosing to major in
philosophy and spending the summers as an inadequate bank clerk, a be-
wildered oilfield laborer, and a miserable salesman. It was the Princeton
celebrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was an emancipated youth but, alas, not
a gilded one. I was deeply impressed by that environment, like the unhappy
novelist himself, but I dimly realized that I did not like it. However, in my
last year we put on a production of a blood-and-thunder play of the twelfth
century from the manuscript of which Shakespeare had stolen the plot of
Hamlet. The characters were the same even if their speeches were bombast.
It was a great success, especially the duelling, which I had coached, and we
took it to New York for two nights. I fell in love with our Ophelia who had
been borrowed from the cast of the Garrick Gaieties. This last was the first
"intimate revue" produced in New York, and I became a familiar backstage
visitor. Philosophy was neglected. I scraped through the comprehensive exams
in May, however, and she came to my commencement in 1925. To be sure,
she jilted me during the following year, when I was a graduate student, but
I had become a sophisticate. I could stroll casually through a stage door.
At the beginning of my senior year I had taken a course in experi-
mental psychology run in permissive fashion by H. S. Langfeld, newly
arrived from Harvard. The eight students were a mixed group but an esprit
de corps developed. Some catalyst was present that precipitated four psy-
chologists from them: Bray, Gahagan, Gibson, and Schlosberg. Langfeld was
delighted with us; he had a touch of the German professor, but he winked
at the horseplay with which we enriched the laboratory exercises. Toward
the end of the year he was able to offer three of us assistantships. This stroke
of luck gave me an identity; I was an academic; not a philosopher, but even
better, a psychologist.
My lack of aptitude for business had been clearly demonstrated, and
my father was willing to take the burden of two sons in college at the same
time. Graduate study in psychology suited me. I brought to it a taste for
pragmatism in philosophy and I soon became excited by the behaviorist revo-
JAMES J. GIBSON 129

lution. Howard Crosby Warren, the founder of Princeton psychology after

James Mark Baldwin, was a friend and champion of Watson, who spoke to
the colloquium. I thought him brash. The next year Langfeld brought E. B.
Holt to the department from Harvard, and we took to his ideas with enthu-
siasm. Holt was a slow writer but a great teacher. He had a contempt for
humbug and a clarity of thought that has never been matched. He had shown
how cognition might itself be a form of response, and he was engaged in
extending conditioned-reflex theory to social behavior, amending the gaps
in the published textbook that his student Floyd Allport had recently written.
He shocked his students by violent predictions in the mildest possible man-
ner of speaking.
Holt's motor theory of consciousness provided a way of encompassing
the facts of Titchener without either trying to refute them or simply to
forget about them. It was a more elegant theory than that of any other be-
haviorist. For thirty years I was reluctant to abandon it, and it is still very
much alive today, but the experimental evidence is now clearly against it.
Awareness seems to me now an activity but not a motor activity, a form of
adjustment that enhances the pickup of information but not a kind of be-
havior that alters the world. Instead of the contrast between consciousness
and behavior that used to preoccupy us, I think we should look for the dif-
ference between observational activity and performatory activity. But this is
getting ahead of the story.
Graduate instruction at Princeton was not split up into different fields.
It was centered around a weekly colloquium at which we made frequent
reports in the form of papers written out and read. The faculty then criti-
cized. There was a group of young instructors, including Leonard Carmichael
who lectured on the evolution of the nervous system. We also learned from
each other and from graduate students in other disciplines. The Graduate
College, where we lived, had a life of its own apart from the University. It
stood on a hill a mile from the campus. Its dean had won the only academic
battle ever lost by Woodrow Wilson in placing it there. We had dinner in
gowns in a great hall. The trappings were a mere imitation of Oxford, no
doubt, but this did not bother us, for the intellectual air was bracing and the
conversations were wide-ranging. The wine cellar included in the plans for
the building was empty, but New Jersey applejack was to be had, and a
stomach for it could be learned, if not a taste.
I did my thesis on the drawing of visual forms from memory to refute
the just-published results of Wulf at Berlin, a student of Koffka's, purport-
ing to show that memories changed spontaneously toward better Gestalten.
The drawings of my subjects differed from the originals only in accordance
with laws of perceptual habit, not laws of dynamic self-distribution, I con-
cluded with great confidence. Form perception was learned. Otherwise one
fell into the arms of Immanuel Kant. I was a radical empiricist, like Holt,
who suspected that the very structure of the nervous system itself was learned
 130 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by neurobiotaxis in accordance with the laws of conditioning. Little did I

know that within six months I would be facing Koffka himself weekly across
a seminar table.
I reported my research one spring under the wing of Langfeld at a
meeting of Titchener's invited group of experimentalists. The great man sat
at the head of a table, like Jehovah in black broadcloth, with an enormous
cigar emerging from a great white beard. I received a few words of advice,
very penetrating. as I recall. He inspired genuine awe, for he quite simply
knew more psychology than anyone else. But my generation had no need
for his theory or his method. His influence was on the wane and he died
soon after. I was later deeply influenced by Boring's modification of the
Titchenerian theory, a modification that permitted psychophysics to go about
its business, but not by analytical introspection. The assumption that all con-
sciousness, or even all cognitive consciousness, can be reduced to sensory
elements is surely untenable.
So it was that in 1928 I was considered qualified to teach psychology.
I went to Smith College Cat $1800 a year). Harold Schlosberg went to Brown;
Chuck Bray stayed at Princeton. At Smith I was to remain for many years.
And within my first week I met that extraordinary man Kurt Koffka, a kind
of person entirely new to my experience.
Koffka had been brought to Northampton by William Allan Neilson,
who installed him in an old house off the campus, permitted him to import
assistants from Russia. Poland, Germany, and elsewhere, and let him experi-
ment to his heart's content. Neilson had not consulted his department of
psychology in making this research appointment, and the teaching staff did
not quite know whether to be honored or offended. But Koffka promptly set
up a weekly seminar to which we were cordially invited.
Koffka did most of the talking, and I listened regularly from 1928 to
1941. I sometimes reported my own work and I occasionally ventured to
argue with him, for my bent was skeptical and pragmatic. Ko£fka hated posi-
tivism. The emerging doctrines of Gestalt theory seemed to me tender-
minded, but I learned a great deal, for the seminar was centered on evi-
dence and the analysis of evidence. In 1933, after the original research funds
had been exhausted, Ko£fka became a member of the department, teaching
one course. He then began to put together the Principles of Gestalt Psy-
chology (1935), requiring his undergraduates to summarize sections of his
manuscript in class as he went along. This strange method of teaching, you
might suppose, would soon bring his course enrollment to zero (the worst of
all fates at a college), but, on the contrary, the girls were dazzled. He chose
the brightest. It was a serious book, dedicated to difficult problems, and there
was no compromise with difficulty.
Of course it is also true that Koffka loved Smith College and that women
melted in his presence. It was once explained to me that such worship of an
odd-looking man with a high-pitched voice came from the fact that he gave
JAMES J. GIBSON 131

absolute attention to any girl he met. But I do not pretend to understand why
they worshipped him. He wrote one of the great books of this century, as I
came to realize later. It took a long time for the Principles to sink in, and I
had to reject the notion of organization and reinterpret the notion of struc-
ture before I could assimilate it, but Koffka, along with Holt, was a main
influence on my psychological thinking.
I had my own teaching, of course, during all this time. There were
never less than nine class hours a week. I had a regular course in social
psychology that ran throughout the year. After fifteen years of it I knew
the field pretty well, but I never tried to publish in it. I also did my stint
of teaching the introductory course and the beginning experimental course.
But my specialty was advanced experimental psychology, which met six hours
a week for thirty-two weeks a year. There were always eight to a dozen
seniors in it, and we ran experiments on every possible problem. They were
generally new experiments, with little or no published evidence as to what
the results might be. Bright students, especially girls, will work like demons
when the outcome will be a contribution to knowledge. At the high point
of this course the students would choose a problem from my offerings, run
the subjects, analyze the data, and write up a report at the rate of one a
month. I still have copies of the best of these papers, and every so often I find
a published experiment that was first performed essentially by one of my
students in the thirties. A good many were publishable. The apparatus was
makeshift (but it was used only once), the statistics were elementary (but
one gets a feeling for reliability), and a satisfying number of the questions we
put to test gave clear answers. There must have been 500 or more such
projects in my years at Smith, and I am sure that they constitute my main
backlog of psychological knowledge. And there is still another backlog in the
files of unanswered questions that I had to dream up in order to keep ahead
of those lovely creatures who had a zeal for discovering how the mind works.
One year, 1930 to 1931, there were eight or nine girls in the course
who were all smart (and all pretty). The mysterious catalyzer of an intel-
lectual group developed. We made astonishing discoveries-that a conditioned
withdrawal-reflex would transfer to the unconditioned hand, for example
(with E. C. Jack & C. Raffel, 1932). We had a lovely time and ended the
year with a splendid picnic. Five of the group went on to become psycholo-
gists. Two of them, Eleanor Jack and Sylvia MacColl, with another from a
previous year, Hulda Rees, became graduate assistants at Smith. That year,
1931 to 1932, was an illustrious one for me. As a prosperous bachelor with
a salary of $2500 in the deep depression, I could take around all three girls
at once, and they were charming as well as being my professional colleagues.
We had weekends in New York and mountain climbing expeditions to New
Hampshire. By summer I was in love with the prettiest of all and pursued
her to Illinois where she was persuaded to marry me in September.
This is the place, perhaps, to jump ahead and speak of my wife's part
 132 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

in the psychological history here being attempted. I will say nothing about
our personal life save that we have had a fine time, have raised two handsome
offspring who seem to be intellectuals like ourselves, and have had our share
of adventures. We have never been a "research team," as many married scien-
tists have, for we collaborate only indifferently. She went to Yale for a year
and got a degree with Clark Hull in a burst of mutual admiration. She was
and is a very tough-minded investigator, for all of being a nice girl. Down
deep she is a Hullian, as I am a Holtian: a rat-behaviorist, as I am a philo-
sophical behaviorist. The influence of Koffka was weaker on her than on me.
She is bored by the epistemological problem, whereas I am fascinated by it.
Nevertheless, we converge in the developing belief that the weakness of
the stimulus-response formula in American psychology lies on the side of
the stimulus, not on that of the response. The experiments on learning that
convince her of this are not the same as the experiments on perception that
convince me of it, but we agree on where to look for the trouble, and we both
think that modern psychology is in deep trouble.
We have no patience with the attempts to patch up the S-R formula
with hypotheses of mediation. In behavior theory as well as psychophysics
you either find causal relations or you do not. After much travail we managed
to write a paper together ten years ago on perceptual learning (with E. J.
Gibson, 1955). Perception, as we said, is a matter of differentiating what is
outside in the available stimulation, not a matter of enriching the bare sensa-
tions of classical stimulation. We barely touched upon the many questions
that arise, however, and agreed upon scarcely more than a few slogans. Leo
Postman saw this paper as a threat to the whole theory of association (Post-
man, 1955), and it was, but he rightly argued that an alternative theory of
perceptual learning had not been spelled out. References to "the Gibsons'
theory of perception," therefore, have given us a bit of a turn, for we were
neither wholly in agreement at the time nor was that paper a theory.
In the last few years, however, we have been working semi-independ-
ently on different levels of the input side of the S-R formula. We now have
a theory. At this moment I have finished a book entitled The Senses Con-
sidered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and my wife has nearly finished one on
perceptual learning and development. The one is consistent with the other. I
have formulated a theory of stimulus information and redescribed the sense
organs as mechanisms for picking it up. She has examined the ways in which
growth and experience enhance the pickup of the invariants that carry in-
formation. As a whole it is new, and the theory has radical implications for
all parts of psychology. But once more I have gotten ahead of the story.
Returning to 1932, I did an experiment that summer before getting mar-
ried. I had previously been using a pair of spectacle frames with optometrist's
trial-prisms in them to verify the old result that one soon learned to reach
for things in the right direction despite their apparent displacement. I had
also observed the curvature adaptation that resulted from wearing the prisms
JAMES J. GIBSON 133

and assumed that this too was a correcting of visual experience by tactual,
in accordance with Bishop Berkeley's theory of visual perception. But there
was disturbing evidence against this presumably self-evident explanation
(even in Stratton's original experiment of this type), and I thought of a
control experiment that would surely put the doctrine of sensory empiricism
back on its feet. I would look at a field of actually curved lines equivalent to
the prismatic distortion for as long as I could stand to do so and show that
no change in apparent curvature would then occur. But to my astonishment
it did occur. Apparent curvature still decreased and straight lines thereafter
looked curved in the opposite direction.
This result was shocking to an empiricist. How could sensory experi-
ence be validated except against other sensory experience? It might, of course,
be validated against behavior, which came to the same thing, but there had
been no behavior in my experiment. I could only conclude that the percep-
tion of a line must be like the sensation of a color or temperature in being
susceptible to the negative afterimage caused by some process of physiological
normalization. This was equally puzzling, however, for it called in question
the very notion that perceptions were based on physiological sensations. This
crucial experiment (see 1933), subsequently elaborated in many ways, has
motivated my thinking for thirty years.
I never pursued the more strenuous experiment of wearing distorting
spectacles for weeks or months, as Ivo Kohler did at Innsbruck in the mid-
thirties, and I failed to discover the full range of phenomenal adaptation to
visual distortion that he did (Kohler, 1951). His results are even more de-
structive of classical theories than mine. Distortion of the visual feedback
from movements of the observer, it now appears, is even more important
than a distortion of visual form with a stationary observer. If I had followed
up this lead I might have come sooner to my present conviction that optical
transformations in time are the main carriers of information, not optical forms
frozen in time.
I continued to work on various problems in the decade before the war.
A great deal of encouragement for research came from the annual oppor-
tunity to report it at the meetings of the Psychological Round Table, a some-
what raffish group of young psychologists in the East, founded on the in-
flexible principle that members became emeritus at the age of forty. Promotion
of assistant professors was not rapid in those days and elevation to member-
ship in the Society of Experimental Psychologists, which was full up with
venerable holdovers from Titchener's day, was not to be expected. At its
first meeting the group voted tolerantly not to call itself the Society of Ex-
perimenting Psychologists. It was concerned not to issue invitations on the
basis of weighty deliberation. On Saturday night a scientific address was de-
livered on sexual or scatological questions. Despite the lightheartedness of
these meetings, discussions and new ideas were fruitful, and criticism was
sharp.
134 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In 1937 one of my friends, an engineer, was a bug on automobiles, and

it was the time of the first driver clinics. The tests being given, I felt, were
nonsense, for the skill of driving a car (on which I prided myself) had never
been analysed. So we analysed it (with L. E. Crooks, 1938). Lewin had
begun to formulate his theory of behavior as locomotion, with fields, valences,
and vectors, but it was static and did not apply very well to visually-guided
real locomotion, so other concepts had to be worked out-the clearance-lines
of obstacles, the margin of safety considered as a ratio, and the temporal £low
of the necessary information for accelerating, decelerating, and steering. Our
paper was not spectacular, but the problems encountered came up again in
my wartime work on aircraft landing (see 1947, 1955) and my later attempt
at a general theory of locomotion (1958). No fact of behavior, it seems to me,
betrays the weakness of the old concept of visual stimuli so much as the
achieving of contact without collision-for example, the fact that a bee can
land on a Hower without blundering into it. The reason can only be that
centrifugal £low of the structure of the bee's optic array specifies locomotion
and controls the How of locomotor responses.
As the reader may gather, I prefer radical solutions to scientific prob-
lems whenever possible. General explanations are always preferable to piece-
meal explanations ("models" as they are nowadays called), and this is all
that is meant by a radical theory. As the depression deepened in the thirties,
I became convinced that a radical solution of politico-socio-economic problems
was possible. Social psychology looked a great deal easier then than it does
now. Marxian socialism provided the only general theory for social action,
and it was internally consistent as compared to the intellectual muddles of
liberalism, and rational as compared to the stupidities of fascism. I was con-
verted from skepticism and pragmatism to radicalism almost overnight in a
strange way: by reading The Education of Henry Adams. In this effete and
indecisive American I seemed to recognize myself. The old American radi-
cals, men like Thorstein Veblen (with whose nephew I had taken a course
in non-Euclidean geometry at Princeton), were men who had rightly been
soured by the rationalizations of satisfied citizens, but they could accomplish
nothing because they had no political backing. The mass support for social
reform could only come, of course, from Labor. So I became a left-winger
and joined the Labor movement.
A group of us on the Smith faculty took out a charter as Local 230 of
the American Federation of Teachers. It was, I think, the first such college
union. We bored from within the American Association of University Pro-
fessors. We sent a delegate to the Northampton trade union council. The lack
of any feeling for socialism among the local unionists puzzled me, and I must
have puzzled them. President Neilson, who often was invited to AAUP
dinners, was hurt by our minority, for he considered himself a radical. So he
was, of course, but with a difference. We never did persuade any public or
secondary school teachers to join our local. My wife and I once went up to
JAMES J. GIBSON 135

organize the Dartmouth faculty, who in truth were exploited worse than we
were, but we got so distracted by a round of parties on the Carnival weekend
that the necessary papers went unsigned.
The truth is, I suppose, that the intellectual radicals of the depression
years, and even the Communist Party, never got to the really hungry people.
Marx could not foresee this. Social behavior was less predictable than we
thought it was. I have reluctantly given up theorizing about politico-economic
problems. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, which I
helped to found and the motivation of which I understood, has become a
group that I no longer understand. No one has a theory any more, only a
conscience. And this is too bad, for, as Lewin said, there is nothing as prac-
tical as a good theory.
The failures of international politics in that era were heartbreaking to
one of my generation. Things might have been different and Hitler might
have been prevented if statesmen and parties had been wiser, that is, if they
had understood what was going on. But to understand, to be able to explain
and predict, entails the knowing of laws. It is our own fault if we do not
know the laws. Because no radical solution to the problems of politics has
been found does not mean that it does not exist. Psychologists are simply, on
an absolute scale, dullards.
When the war came in 1941, I felt little idealism about it. Nevertheless,
it was as good a war as could be expected if there had to be one, and there
were opportunities for a psychologist to make a practical contribution. I left
in the middle of the year and spent some months in Washington where the
program of psychological research units in the Army Air Force was being
organized. I then spent eighteen months in Fort Worth, Texas, at the head-
quarters of the Flying Training Command and another two and one-half
years at Santa Ana Army Air Base in California.
Psychological research units were mainly needed for personnel selec-
tion. At one time, something like the equivalent to the entire college popula-
tion of the country was being trained for Hying duty of one sort or another,
and selection for aptitude was essential. There was some research on training,
of which I will speak, but testing was our main responsibility. Most of the
psychologists recruited for this job were experimentalists like myself, not test
psychologists. There was to be an entirely new approach to aptitude testing.
One of the new ideas was to use motion picture screening for the
presentation of test items. And another, more obvious, was the development
of tests for the visual perception of space. The Army Air Corps had to be at
home in the "wild blue yonder." The motion picture unit became my re-
sponsibility and the ancient problem of space perception was my burden. It
was worrisome, for, as I gradually came to realize, nothing of any practical
value was known by psychologists about the perception of motion, or of
locomotion in space, or of space itself. The classical cues for depth referred
to paintings or parlor stereoscopes, whereas the practical problems of military
136 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

aviation had to do with takeoff and landing, with navigation and the recogni-
tion of landmarks, with pursuit or evasion, and with the aiming of bullets
or bombs at targets. What was thought to be known about the retinal image
and the physiology of retinal sensations simply had no application to these
performances. Birds and bees could do them, and a high proportion of young
males could learn to do them, but nobody understood how they could.
The Aviation Psychology Program included four or five research units
besides the motion picture unit. We made tests for aircrew aptitudes, hun-
dreds upon hundreds of them; and we tested the tests in the Anglo-American
tradition of statistical prediction. We validated against the criteria of pass-fail
in the flying schools, and the navigator, bombardier, and gunnery schools, and
thus lifted ourselves by our own bootstraps. We analysed the factors in the
correlations between tests and struggled to interpret them. But I, at least,
have never achieved a promising hypothesis by means of factor-analysis. The
so-called "spatial" abilities extracted from existing tests still seem to me unin-
telligible. The fact is, I now think, that the spatial performances of men and
animals are based on stimulus-information of a mathematical order that we
did not even dream of in the 1940's. There are invariants of structure or
pattern under transformation. Moreover, the information is so redundant in
natural situations, with so many covariant equivalent variables and so many
ways of getting information that substitute for one another, that the isolation
of cues for testing these perceptual skills is a problem we will not soon solve.
Perceiving is flexible, opportunistic, and full of multiple guarantees for de-
tecting facts. It is no wonder that the hope of fairly sampling perception with
paper-and-pencil tests, pictorial tests, or even motion picture tests has not
been realized. And the building of apparatus to simulate the stimulus-in-
formation in life situations is difficult when one does not know what the
information is.
The test-construction work of my own unit has been described elsewhere
(1944, 1947) and need not be repeated. Adapting the motion picture for
group testing was a fascinating problem. Our test films were partly shot and
were always processed and printed in a militarized motion picture studio
staffed with industry personnel who had simply put on uniforms. Air Force
training films were also produced in this studio where the Hal Roach comedies
had been made. We also had the facilities of Hollywood available. I became
as sophisticated about film studios as I had been about the stage. I learned a
great deal about the technology of film-making and something about the
psychology of the sort of perception that the film can mediate. A true under-
standing of this sort of vicarious experience would be a triumph for both
psychology and the cinema if it could be achieved. But there is a vast gulf
between what the film expert knows and what the perception psychologist
knows. The cinematographer knows how to convey astonishing versions of
reality on a sheaf of light-rays but cares nothing for the eye. The psychologist
JAMES J. GIBSON 137

thinks he knows about the eye but has never paid any attention to the
subtleties in the sheaf of rays. The two do not communicate.
Toward the end of the war my research unit was finally asked to work
on a problem that had long interested us, the question of how a training
film taught, or conveyed information, and what kinds of subject matter the
cinema was uniquely adapted to teach. The previous experimental literature
on educational films in schools and colleges and the controversies over «visual
education" were almost useless. The Air Force had been using training films
on an unprecedented scale for all sorts of purposes and literally hundreds of
them were available: for orientation, for morale, for propaganda against pick-
ing up girls not approved by the usa, and for instruction in all the classes
of all kinds of training schools down to technical films on how to rivet alu-
minum. The AAF Production Unit in Culver City would make a training
film on any subject whatever. But nobody had any clear idea as to whether
or not they did any good. We had been analysing some of the shooting scripts
of instructional films in advance of production to see if we could develop a
theory of what a motion picture shot could do that nothing else could. And
this led to an experiment.
R. M. Gagne, who had once been my student in peacetime and who was
the only other pure experimental psychologist ever assigned to us as an of-
ficer, worked on it with me. Essentially what we did was to take an instruc-
tional film that we considered excellent and compare it with the best possible
illustrated manual and the best possible illustrated lecture on the same mate-
rial. The auditory instruction with the motion sequences ran only fifteen
minutes; the written and oral instruction with the static pictures was fuller
and ran thirty minutes. Despite the time difference, aviation cadets learned
significantly more from the teaching with sequential displays than they did
from the teaching with the graphic displays. The reasons were fairly clear.
What had to be learned was a system of how to aim at a moving target
(fighter plane) from a moving platform (bomber). As the situation changed.
the action changed. The film showed how one thing varied with another; the
book and the talk could graph it, represent stages of it, and describe it in
several ways, but could not display the continuous covariation in time. More-
over, and this impressed me, the film could make use of the «subjective
camera," taking the point of view of the learner and displaying how the
situation would look to him. not merely what things looked like. The experi-
ment is more fully described in my book (1947, ch. 10).
Gagne and I also worked on aircraft recognition, the discrimination and
identification of small dark silhouettes against the sky with only slight differ-
ences in form. It was a life-and-death matter in certain theaters of the war.
Weeks of training were spent on it in all branches of the service. Perhaps
no other such peculiar perceptual skill has ever been so widely learned and
taught. A large number of instructors was required, and it once seemed to
 138 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

me that half the English professors of America must be serving their country
by teaching the subject. But how to do it? The psychologist Renshaw, at
Ohio State, had early convinced the military that the secret of recognition
was promptness and the way to get quick perceptual reactions was to give
quick stimuli, that is, to show photographic slides of airplanes with a tachis-
toscope. The English professors were endlessly flashing pictures on a screen
so as to speed up their students' perceptions. The only thing that could be
said for such training was that it was less boring than most military courses.
The trouble was that when the boys got overseas they could not recognize
aircraft.
By the end of 1943 there began to be disillusion with the Renshaw
flash system, and a few aviation psychologists were allowed to take a crack
at the problem. An airplane has to be recognized in any of its possible orien-
tations. We advocated the use of solid models, the changing shadows of solid
models on a translucent screen, motion picture shots, and instead of pictures,
caricatures or cartoon drawings of the different airplanes that exaggerated
their distinctive features. Gagne and I did a lot of nice research on the
kind of learning involved in this perceptual skill (Gibson, 1947, ch. 7). We
learned more about the perception of objects, I think, than we would ever
have done by running standard laboratory experiments on form-perception.
For one thing, I got a nagging suspicion that nobody ever really sees a Bat
form in life, that is, a picture of a thing. One sees a continuous family of
perspective transformations, an infinity of forms, that somehow specifies the
solid shape of the object. This puzzle remained with me for twelve years
until I was able, in collaboration with my wife, to conclude that the invariants
in a family of transformations are effective stimuli for perception (with E. J.
Gibson, 1957).
The suggestion that it is the distinctive features in the transformations
of objects, not the forms as such, that enable us to recognize them is a very
fruitful if radical hypothesis. What a caricaturist does is to freeze the dif-
ferences between one human face and all others in a drawing, emphasizing
the differences and omitting the similarities. A caricature therefore is not
usefully understood as a distortion of a face or a misrepresentation, for it
specifies the person and conveys information about him. This is information
in the recently discovered meaning of the term which implies that a stimulus
is definable as what it is not instead of as what it is.
I was lucky in the war, for unlike most I got to work finally at what
I could best do. I did not care much for military life (the few psychologists
who revelled in it were not ones I respected), but I made a lot of friends,
and putting my education to a practical test was a new education. I dis-
covered that what I had known before did not work. I learned that when
a science does not usefully apply to practical problems there is something
wrong with the theory of the science. So, after writing up my contribution
to the shelf of volumes on aviation psychology, I got out, returned to my
JAMES J. GIBSON 139

teaching at Smith, and began at once to write a book on visual perception

that took off from new assumptions. This was The Perception of the Visual
Warld (1950).
Ko£fka had died, and my wife and I felt that the spark had gone out
in the old Smith College department, so we were glad to go to Cornell in
1949. Unhappily, she could no longer teach as she had done since 1932
(with time out) under Neilson's canny policy of hiring husbands and wives
in the same department and getting two for the price of one-and-a-half.
Smith has experienced no difficulty with the supposed evils of nepotism, and
it is a pity that universities will not try the experiment of tolerating spouses.
I doubt that they put their heads together any more than other academic pairs.
The book came out during the first year at Cornell. The crux of it
came in the third chapter where the experience of the visual world was
contrasted with the experience of the visual ~eld. The former was the aware-
ness of one's surroundings; the latter was an awareness of one's visual sensa-
tions when the eyes were fixated. I was out to give an explanation of the
former, not of the latter. Depth and distance and objects of constant size and
shape were seen, I suggested, not judged or inferred, and the question was
how this could be explained. The perceptual impression was primary and the
sensory impressions were secondary, being obtained only with an introspec-
tive attitude. The "cues for depth" were what depth and distance looked like
when they were not simply seen as depth and distance. The real stimuli for
perception (I should have said stimulus-information for perception) were
gradients of the retinal image (I should have said invariants of the optic
array).
The main new idea I introduced was that of optical texture, which
enabled me to define and illustrate gradients of the density of optical tex-
ture. Such a gradient was asserted to be in psychophysical correspondence
with the recession or slant of a phenomenal surface. This assertion has been
checked by a good many experimenters in the last fifteen years and it seems
to hold up. At least it does if optical "texture" is treated generally as the
overall structure of the optic array. It subdivides into many other hypotheses
that cannot be detailed here.
The idea that such a gradient might be a stimulus opened up a quite
new possibility of explaining how perception might be veridical, for the
gradient of density was a consequence of the perspective projection of light
from the real surfaces of the environment. The correspondence of phenomenal
surfaces to physical ones might be thus accounted for without any appeal
to innate intuition, or the correction of sensations by past experience, or a
spontaneous organization of the sensory data in the brain-in short, with no
appeal to any theory of perception whatever. Here was a new basis for a
realist solution to the epistemological problem.
My sixteen years at Cornell have been largely devoted to the develop-
ing, testing, and sometimes the altering of the ideas set forth in the Visual
140 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

World. They keep generating fresh ideas and opening up new explanations.
A great number of exploratory experiments and some twenty or more pub-
lished ones have come out pretty much as expected. 1\10st of these involve
surface-perception in one way or another: extending to the edges of sur-
faces; the layout of surfaces; the motions of surfaces, both rigid and non-
rigid; the perception of human faces as elastic surfaces; the tactual perception
of surface-layout; and recently the perception of impending collision with a
surface (Schiff, 1965).
These experiments are not concerned any more with the perception of
space but with the perception of the features of the world, the furniture
of the environment, and what they afford. The old puzzle of depth-perception.
I think, can be dismissed. Space, so-called. is not separable from meaning.
An example is provided by the experiments dune by my wife and Richard
\Valk on detection of a "visual cliff" (Gibson & Walk, 1960). Animals and
babies are very sensitive to the optical information that specifies depth down-
ward at an edge. This specifies (or "means," if I may use the term) a falling-
off place. For a terrestrial animal it affords falling and hence injury. It might
be expected therefore that this unique discontinuity in a transforming optic
array would be readily picked up by terrestrial animals. Their behavior shows
that it is. But this result does not in the least imply that animals and babies
possess innate depth-perception in the sense intended by Immanuel Kant.
It implies that their visual systems first detect those gross features of the
layout of the world that are important for animals and babies. The informa-
tion for a cliff is in the ambient light. The notion that they are born with
depthless visual sensations to which the third dimension is added by any
operation, learned or unlearned, now seems to me quite ridiculous.
There was a period in the 1950's when we explored the possibilities
and the limitations of the kind of visual perception that is mediated by still
pictures, drawings, photographs, and the like. I learned from it a great re-
spect for painters and the art of painting. I was bewildered by the continuing
controversy of art considered as representation versus art in the styles loosely
called nonrepresentative. I have come to think that the futile debates about
nonrepresentative art stem from our ignorance about the information in light.
Psychologists and artists have misled one another; we have borrowed the
so-called cues for depth from the painters, and they in turn have accepted
the theory of perception we deduced from their techniques.
Eventually I came to realize how unlike the pictorial mode of percep-
tion is from the natural one. The former is perception at second hand; the
latter is perception at first hand. The framed optic array coming from a pic-
ture to an eye is quite unlike the natural optic array coming from the world
to an eye. The latter is only a sector, a sample, of the total ambient array.
Eyes evolved so as to see the world, not a picture. Since this became clear
to me I have tried to give up any use whatever of the term "retinal image."
The assumption that there is a picture on the retina has led to all sorts of
JAMES J. GIBSON 141

unnecessary and insoluble problems, problems for psychology, art, and optics.
I have ventured to assume that classical instrumental optics comprises a set
of convenient fictions for a rather dull branch of applied physics and that a
new ecological optics can be worked out (1961).
I now assume that perception does not depend on sensory impressions
at all, but instead only on the pickup of stimulus information. Sense-data are
incidental symptoms of experience, not its foundation, and the effort of
Titchener and his predecessors to make an inventory of them was almost
wholly wasted.
The theory of perception as the registering of information and of per-
ceptual learning as the education of attention to information in the available
stimulation applies as well to touching, listening, smelling, and tasting as it
does to looking. It illuminates the evolution of perceptual systems in animals.
It explains the development of the subtle perceptual skills of man. The
theory will be open to examination with the publication of my new book
( 1966) and the forthcoming one written by my wife on perceptual learning.
I have had to contradict the most venerable doctrines of sensory physiology,
and she has had to throwaway the laws of association, seemingly the only
foundation for empiricism since Locke. It is too soon to say whether the
alternative ideas will catch on in physiology, psychology, and education. We
shall see.
In conclusion, a kind of self-examination may be revealing. What I
have most wanted to do all my life is to make a contribution to knowledge.
If you feel you are doing this it is much more fun than running things, or
being a military commander, a departmental chairman, a participant in the
brotherhood of workers, a mountain climber, or even an actor. And it seems
to me that one can contribute to knowledge without being very bright (which
I am not) but merely by being stubborn about it. Such a contribution, of
course, has to be expounded and clarified, and this is where teaching comes
in. It is a two-way process, and no one does it for himself. One must listen
as well as talk; read as well as write. Knowledge is not knowledge until it
is preserved in dusty libraries for the future. But despite all that, the big
satisfaction comes from the thinking that first went into it, the satisfaction
of seeing old facts and new data fall into place.
I have been a lucky member of a rich society that has made it mate-
rially easy for someone who wants to contribute to knowledge to do so. At
least it has been easy since the Great Depression. I have been given all the
breaks. I have had time for thinking and writing at most of the havens pro-
vided for the leisure of the theory class, as someone put it. I have been to
Oxford University (1955-56), the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
(1958-59), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
(1963-64). They are wonderful places. My career has been made possible
by the fact of endowments, and my research has been generously supported
by the federal taxpayer. I am a creature of a prosperous age.
 142 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There

are some 20,000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom
have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them
seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality.
They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is consolidate our
scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to
me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time
the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!
I have, in my time, experienced the gratification of having people un-
burden themselves about their emotional problems and the fascination of
getting inside the complex personality of another. I have felt the urge to
help others. I even think I might have been a successful clinician. But noth-
ing that I know as a scientist would have helped me to be one.
As to my personal peculiarities, the principal one is my deafness. I have
had to wear a hearing aid for the last twenty years, and the loss seems to
be progressive. The earliest of the surgical remedies for otosclerosis failed in
my case and the later ones would probably not do me much good. The stand-
ard wisecrack that it must be a great advantage to be able to turn off the
noises of the world at will gives me a hollow laugh. Deafness is isolating.
For some reason I could never learn to pick up the visual information for
lip-reading, although I have occasionally tried. On the other hand, I think
I am fairly acute at understanding facial and gestural expressions. This is
a contradiction I cannot resolve. I have tended to compensate for deafness
by advertising it instead of trying to hide the necessary apparatus. Most
people, in face-to-face conversation, react appropriately to this signal, and
to them one is grateful. A few are disconcerted and, worst of all, a few
shout. Conversation is nevertheless fairly satisfactory. The main frustration is
in group discussion and in the failure of auditory localization. It is very hard
for someone to realize that when he calls to me I do not know which way
to look for him.
It is interesting that my vision has held up well even past the age
when presbyopia limits the unaided acuity of most persons. I use my eyes for
all sorts of purposes; I have educated them, and I sometimes wonder if that
has anything to do with it.
I think I have a new solution to the ancient puzzle of how animals and
men perceive. It is pieced together, of course, from selected bits of all the
old solutions, but it has one new piece that makes everything fit-the concept
of available stimulus-information and the relegation of stimulus-energy to
its own level. There are other psychologists who have thought about percep-
tion almost as I do, but not quite. The one with whom in recent years I have
been in strikingly near agreement is Albert Michotte, of Louvain-in every-
thing but the notion of external information and external meaning. CHis
death, since this was first written, is a great loss to psychology.) It is a
notable lesson in the convergence of experimental science that such a man
JAMES J. GIBSON 143

as he and such a one as I, from totally different backgrounds, should have

found ourselves agreeing so thoroughly and so delightedly-he, a student of
Cardinal Mercier and I of the materialist Holt; he, a believer and phe-
nomenologist and I a skeptic and behaviorist; he, a member of the conserva-
tive Belgian nobility, a prince of the Catholic Church, and I a Midwestern
Sunday-school radical with an underlying suspicion of popery. We got the
same results. This is what counts. It makes one believe in the possibility of
getting at the truth.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by James J. Gibson
(with E. G. Jack & C. Raffel) Bilateral transfer of the conditioned response in
the human subject. J. expo Psychol., 1932, 15, 416-421.
Adaptation, aftereffect, and contrast in the perception of curved lines. J. expo
Psychol., 1933, 16, 1-31.
(with L. E. Crooks) A theoretical field-analysis of automobile driving. Amer. J.
Psychol., 1938, 51, 453-471.
History, organization, and research activities of the Psychological Test Film Unit,
Army Air Forces. Psychol. Bull., 1944, 41,457-468.
(Ed.) Motion picture testing and research. Aviat. Psychol. Res. Rep., No. 7
(Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office), 1947.
The perception of the visual world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950.
(with E. J. Gibson) Perceptual learning: differentiation or enrichment? Psychol.
Rev., 1955, 62, 33-41.
(with P. alum & F. Rosenblatt) Parallax and perspective during aircraft landings.
Amer. J. Psychol., 1955, 68, 372-385.
(with E. J. Gibson) Continuous perspective transformations and the perception
of rigid motion. J. expo Psychol., 1957, 54, 129-138.
Visually controlled locomotion and visual orientation in animals. Brit. J. Psychol.,
1958, 49, 183-194.
Ecological optics. Vision Res., 1961, 1, 253-262.
The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1966.

Other Publications Cited

Gibson, E. J. & Walk, R. The "visual cliff." Scientific American, 1960, 202 (No.
4), 64-71.
Koffka, K. Principles of Gestalt psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1935.
Kohler, 1. Vber Aufbau und Wandlungen der Wahrnehmungswelt. Vienna: R. M.
Rohrer, 1951.
Postman, L. Association theory and perceptual learning. Psychol. Rev., 1955, 62,
438-446.
Schiff, W. Perception of impending collision. Psychol. Monog., 1965, 79 (No.
604), 1-26.
145
Kurt Goldstein
(Edited by Dr. Walther Riese)

I was born in Kattowitz, a small town in Upper Silesia, Germany, now

a part of Poland. I went to a so-called classical Gymnasium in which my
interest in learning was directed mainly toward the humanities. We were
taught the Latin and Greek languages and their literature for many hours a
week. Modern languages were somewhat neglected and we read their litera-
ture in German translation. We also were taught mathematics, physics,
botany, zoology, and geography.
When I had received my bachelor degree CAbiturium), I went to the
University of Breslau and from there for one term to Heidelberg, returning
for the rest of my education to Breslau, where I received my medical degree
and my license to practice.
I was undecided in the beginning whether to major in philosophy or
natural science, particularly after I went to Heidelberg, where I became very
much interested in philosophy and literature. I chose natural science as a
profession and became a physician.
Due to the organization of German universities I had ample opportunity,
as all students had, to explore many other fields. During the first two years
no examination had to be passed and one could elect his studies according
to his own time and preference, thereby acquiring knowledge in many areas
simultaneously. Medicine appeared to me best suited to satisfy my deep
inclination to deal with human beings and to be able to help them. The
vague knowledge I had of medicine concerned mainly diseases of the nervous
system, which seemed to me to be particularly in need of attention. At that
time these diseases were generally considered to be caused by abnormal bodily
conditions. Thus, the study of anatomy and physiology was taken for granted,
and so they became :first the chosen area of my studies and very soon of my
research.

Dr. Goldstein died September 19, 1965. Dr. Riese was Dr. Goldstein's associate
and is presently emeritus associate professor of neurology, psychiatry, and the history
of medicine at the Medical College of Virginia. Formerly he was consulting neuro-
pathologist to the Department of Mental Hygiene and Hospitals of the Commonwealth
of Virginia, charge de recherches du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique
(Paris), and Privatdozent of neurology at the University of Frankfurt aiM.

147
148 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Even as a senior medical student I became most interested in the theo-

retical problems which could be worked out in the laboratory. I was therefore
attracted to the work of researchers who were especially active in the field
of my endeavors. The anatomist Professor Schaper, whose specialty was the
embryonic development of the nervous system of man, was an example for
me. Another was the famous psychiatrist, Professor Karl Wernicke, who in-
vestigated the symptomatology of psychosis in connection with the post-
mortem findings in the brain, and I became interested in his use of psychology
to understand psychic phenomena. In that era there was more interest in
psychosis than in neurosis and, indeed, each was usually treated separately.
Neurology as an independent field gained interest much later. There was, for
a long time, dispute as to whether neurological cases should be treated in a
medical department or in a psychiatric institute. Only when men like Nonne,
Erb, Ottfried, Forster, Edinger, Kussmaul, and others began to work exclu-
sively in neurology did it become an independent specialty of study and
teaching.
I am very grateful and devoted to those teachers of mine, not only be-
cause I had the opportunity to acquire so much knowledge from them, but
because each of them developed in me certain characteristic procedures of
scientihc investigation, which I learned only later to appreciate at full value.
Schaper taught me to appraise and give painstaking attention to the most
minute details and impressed me by his precise and detailed observations and
descriptions of data often mistakenly considered unimportant, as well as by
his complete personal dedication to his work. I learned from him how to
observe developmental processes and come to an understanding of living na-
ture without falling prey to mechanical interpretations. With Wernicke I
became aware of the interrelation of matter and function, which led to a
psychological interpretation of the symptoms of nervous diseases. His recog-
nition of the significance of psychology for psychiatry was far beyond that
of other psychiatrists of his time.
In Edinger I found an excellent interpreter of the great variations in
the relationship of the structure of the nervous system to the behavior of
animals; thus, he created a new field of science: "the comparative anatomy
of the nervous system." Although my basic concepts later diverged from
his, he had a lifelong effect upon my thinking. His was an all-embracing
attitude toward living beings; he turned particularly to the study of the
central nervous system of man. It led him to strive for a treatment center
as the goal of his work, a wish that unfortunately was never to be fulfilled.
The strength of his intention was shown in the fact that he not only gave me,
his Oberar::t (first assistant) in his institute, whom he needed very badly,
permission to organize my special institute for brain-injured soldiers, but he
even dismissed me from his laboratory with the words, "Your work with
human beings is of much greater importance than my theoretical work in the
laboratories." How deep this concern of his was, could be seen in the serious-
KURT GOLDSTEIN 149

ness with which this famous man treated the patients in the small outpatient
department of his institute. I remember vividly his kindness to patients and
co-workers alike. He used to say, when a young researcher wrote a paper
about a topic that he himself wanted to study, "How good! Now I won't have
to do it," and at once wrote those words in a kind letter to the author.
When he died in 1919, I became. as he had been, 0.0. Ordinarius (pro-
fessor in ordinary) of neurology at the University of Frankfurt aiM. As
such I had to teach neurology at the University. He left me with the difficult
task of becoming the director of the neurological institute and of the institute
for brain-injured soldiers, which I had founded under military authority
during the First World War and which was under my care from 1916 until
1933. when I left Germany. It demanded much theoretical and practical
work. In addition I had at the same time to treat a considerable number of
war-neurotics; this, from both theoretical and practical points of view, was
very fortunate. Management of this great caseload was possible only because
I found a considerable number of young co-workers.
1\ly major activity was directed toward rehabilitation of the brain-injured
in all physical and psychic aspects. The institute staff included medical doc-
tors, one of whom was Professor Walther Riese; psychologists, including Pro-
fessor Egon Weigel; schoolteachers; and a number of craftsmen who taught
patients trades according to the latters' remaining abilities. This therapeutic
vocational program was organized after careful observation and study of each
patient by our professional staff. Psychological examination and training of
aphasic patients was my special interest for many years and thus became an
outstanding subject of study in the institute. I had engaged for this special
purpose a number of competent psychologists to assist me. I want to mention
the invaluable help I received from my late friend and co-worker, the psy-
chologist Adhemar Gelb. The details of our work during the first years are
recorded at length in the book Die Behandlung, Fursorge und Begutachtung
hirnverletzter Soldaten (Treatment, Social Care and Evaluation of Brain-
Injured Soldiers) published in 1919.
Thousands of brain-injured soldiers passed through our hospital where
we had developed my method for the application of psychology to the in-
vestigation of disordered brain functions. I had dedicated myself for many
years previously to psychology and psychotherapy, and as far back as 1927
I had taken part in the organization of the International Society for Psycho-
therapy. When a new department. of neurology was contemplated at the
Moabit Hospital of the City of Berlin I accepted the offer to become its
director. This neurological department of the general hospital was built ac-
cording to my plans and provided the facilities I needed for the treatment of
patients and the development of my theoretical work. In this way the vision
of Ludwig Edinger became a reality.
I left my o.i). professorship at the University of Frankfurt aiM., one
of the few chairs of neurology in Germany, with great regret. Unfortunately,
150 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I could not enjoy this very interesting and, I think, promising work for longer
than a few years because I was one of the first professors at the University to
be arrested by the Nazis, and I had to leave Germany.
I then accepted an invitation to be the guest of the University of Am-
sterdam. That year was a particularly fruitful one for the development of
my ideas, as it gave me time to write my book Der Aufhau des Organismus,
first appearing in Holland in 1934 in the German language edition and in
1938 in English in the United States under the title The Organism. In
this book I presented my views on the organization and functions of the
central nervous system from the "holistic approach." I tried to explain not
only my procedure in the treatment of patients but also my convictions about
research in biology. The latter resulted in a definite interpretation of the
nature of man that I consider to be the basis of my treatment.
In 1935 I left Amsterdam and arrived in New York where I obtained a
license to practice medicine. I was given the opportunity to work at the
New York State Psychiatric Institute and became clinical professor of psy-
chiatry at Columbia University. At the Montefiore Hospital the director
organized a laboratory of neurophysiology for me. During 1938-39 I was
appointed by the president and fellows of Harvard College to read the Wil-
liam James Lecture on Philosophy and Psychology. This lecture was pub-
lished under the title Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology
(1940). From 1940 to 1945 I was clinical professor of neurology at Tufts
Medical School in Boston under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
From then on I was engaged in the private practice of neuropsychiatry and
psychotherapy, as visiting professor of psychopathology at the College of the
City of New York, as visiting professor at the New School for Social Research
in New York, and later as professor at Brandeis University on the same
subject.
In trying to present a review of my research and the theoretical founda-
tion of my activities I feel somewhat embarrassed at the sheer volume of my
publications, which may be simply the effect of my long life. The widely
diversified topics, belonging to different problems, even to different fields of
science, may look as if they had little interrelationship and were simply the
result of a scattering of interests. That is not so. Some papers were inspired
accidentally by the presence of patients who presented specific problems call-
ing for special investigations and, as a matter of fact, issued from practical
problems with which I was confronted.
Increasing knowledge taught me that one can understand each single
phenomenon correctly only when one considers it in relation to others, all
the normal patterns and abnormal symptoms a patient presents (see The Or-
ganism, p. 78). It is of the utmost importance that one evaluate any aspect
of the human organism in relation to the condition of the organism in its
totality. On this understanding is based what I have called self-realization.
The trend toward self-realization is not merely a stimulus but a driving force
 KURT GOLDSTEIN 151

that puts the organism into action. What one usually calls the influence of
the environment is the coming to terms between the organism and the world
in "adequacy."
As stated in an early paper, the cause of poor results in the therapy of
organically damaged patients was the neglect of the aforementioned prob-
lematic character of the symptom. Even experts, masters in their field, started
their investigation from a "primary symptom" that was often selected by
theoretical consideration. One can say that a basic reason for their failure
was the associationist psychology, which had at that time a prevailing influ-
ence on the thinking of physicians in general. My practical procedure, though
not determined by any theory, induced me to formulate some methodological
postulates which, I thought, had to be taken into consideration in all in-
vestigations and which I still consider the most important before we attempt
any interpretation.
The first postulate is to consider initially all the phenomena presented
by the organism, giving no preference in the description to any special one.
At this stage, no symptom is to be considered of greater or lesser importance
for the diagnosis. It must be left to future investigation to determine to what
extent one symptom rather than another is essential for understanding the
underlying defect of a function.
The second methodological postulate concerns the correct description
of the observable phenomena. It was a frequent mistake to write down what
amounted to the mere description of the simple positive or negative results
obtained from an investigation that issued from a theory. A correct result
may be ambiguous in respect to its underlying function. Therefore only a
thorough analysis and presentation of the way in which the effect, whether
success or failure, was achieved can provide clarification of the perform-
ance. Equally ambiguous can be the wrong answer or the missing one or say-
ing, "I do not know." Though only positive phenomena can be used for
gaining knowledge, the negative ones can be very important indirectly. They
are an indication that something is going wrong. The patient may not be
able to answer, but if one is able to eliminate the secondary phenomenon
that hindered him, then one may gain knowledge of what he is able to do,
and that alone is of importance. Often one will find that it is not the nega-
tive result itself which indicates the incapacity of the individual. A feeling
of insufficiency, which mayor may not produce a number of other dis-
turbances, may in turn produce different effects. What happens in this re-
spect depends on the evaluation ~f the insufficiency by the patient himself
and on the effect of the relationship between the physician and the patient,
on what we call the transference. What is going on in the patient is not
simply the failure to answer; his reaction can be interpreted only in relation
to an often very complicated network of events.
The older psychopathological protocols usually confined themselves to
a consideration of whether or not the patient answered a question correctly.
 152 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

This plus-or-minus method is inadequate, no matter whether the answer is

correct or false. If we regard a reaction only from the standpoint of the actual
solution of a task, a correct answer can be presented in spite of a wrong
procedure. That may lead us to overlook a deviation from normality since the
individual may fulfill the task by a detour which may not be evident in the
answer.
The third methodological postulate is a careful description of the present
condition of the organism in which the answer appears. Many errors would
have been avoided in psychopathology if these postulates, quite definitely
stated by Hughlings Jackson in a similar way decades ago, had not been so
frequently neglected.
There are two objections to our methodological postulates. The first
is that one can never really determine at what point an examination can be
regarded as completed. When, within the frame of reference of our postula-
tions, we seek to analyze as many individual performances of a patient as
possible, this technique will certainly obviate the grossest errors even though
it may not lead to absolutely incontestable results. The investigation should
be carried far enough to insure at least that a theory can be developed which
will render understandable all observed phenomena and point out the ones
not yet observed, leaving these latter open for further investigation.
A second objection to our postulates may be that our procedure neces-
sarily limits the number of cases investigated. As a matter of fact, we have
on occasion based our results on a few or even a single case, the results of
which advanced our knowledge. Conversely, the study of a great number of
patients is often misleading because, as the literature bears witness, one can-
not investigate them all in the same careful manner. It seems to me that
the only alternative is to carry out the examination of each patient to the
extent we have indicated before. Investigations of other patients may induce
us to modify our first assumptions, but if the analysis of the first one was
sufficiently thorough, additional investigations will not destroy the concept,
only round it out. I would like to illustrate our procedure by an example of
one patient with a speech disturbance, showing how "step-by-step" investi-
gation can gain results that bring us nearer to the truth. I used this method
of investigation in my first paper on the subject, amnesic aphasia (1905). I
had not yet corne to the interpretation that I later considered the right one,
but even this unfinished presentation was important as a stepping-stone for
the development of my theoretical point of view insofar as I already re-
alized that we have to consider two different forms of man's relationship
to the world, a realization that proved important for deeper understanding
of the symptoms (see The Organism, ch. VII).
The clinically outstanding symptom of this patient with brain damage
was his inability to name an object in spite of recognizing it and being able
to speak the word for it in the next sentence-a symptom-complex frequently
observed in brain damage. For example, a woman patient was unable to say
KURT GOLDSTEIN 153

the word "umbrella" when asked "What is this? What do vou call it?" but
immediately afterward said, "I have three umbrellas at hom~." This seeming
contradiction was explained by further examination which showed that the
patient was impaired in a special mental capacity which we later called "ab-
stract attitude." This defect was overlooked at first. Was the failure related
to the defect of the abstract attitude? Subsequent experimental studies on
normal people confirmed the assumption. We understand now that the miss-
ing capacity was not at all a defect of a special function of finding words
or a defect of an association between the "image" of objects and particular
words, as we had assumed. That made understandable why therapy based on
this assumption was so unsuccessful.
Other symptoms that the patient presented and that had previously
been considered the effect of another damage of the brain could then like-
wise be explained simply as the impairment of abstraction. We came more
and more to the conclusion that the whole clinical picture might well be
understood by the application of the holistic approach, which began to play
an increasingly important role in my attempt to understand the behavior of
human beings, normal and pathological. But another very important ques-
tion arose which could not be answered yet.
I was aware from the beginning that the orientation that tries to eval-
uate each single phenomenon in relation to the knowledge of the whole
organism confronts us with an epistemological problem of the first order
(see The Organism, p. 399 fl.). Certainly such knowledge cannot be derived
from the results of natural science methodology. So this became my main prob-
lem: How can we move from the quantitative experiences of natural science
to the qualitative ones of biology? In The Organism I stated that we should
not hesitate to assume a creative power of the living being as the basis of
such an endeavor. This we find in the practice of medicine, as witnessed by
a great number of my own experiences with patients. Medicine is based on
scientific experiences, not on theoretical ideas from which its practice can
simply be deduced; it is a kind of artistic enterprise and so mirrors the na-
ture of man, which requires risk-taking and courage (see The Organism, P:
306). As I have said, "Courage in its final analysis is nothing but an affirma-
tive answer to the shocks of existence which must be borne for the actualiza-
tion of one's own nature."
I presented the investigation of this patient in order to show how an
apparently inconspicuous symptom, such as the loss of ability to find a word
under special conditions, could be masked in other situations by the patient.
Thus, I came to devote my efforts to solving the most complicated and essen-
tial epistemological problem of biology and medicine, a problem that accom-
panied my endeavors to understand patients and their treatment all my life
and for which I found a solution much later. It applied to many conditions
we confront in clinical neurology and psychiatry, particularly aphasia, agnosia,
and apraxia. Therapy was not in all respects satisfactory. Because the psy-
154 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

chological analysis was not sufficient, our task was mainly custodial, bringing
the patient relief from stress by medication and other means.
My greatest problem grew out of my awareness at this period that I
could not achieve my goal with the method of natural science. Certainly,
the objects of natural science are a part of our life and the results of this
method are of great significance, but they are of a different nature from
the objects of our present studies, the objects of biology. The dissimilarity
of the "Facts" that we study does not mean that they derive from two
different worlds; the differentiation is the product of man's ability to look
at things from a variety of viewpoints which correspond to different goals.
It is always the one living world which we are confronted with, but we
make use of the experiences therein for other purposes than those of natural
science. The purpose of the world of natural science is to gain security; of
the other, to live in its full nature. Man's most dangerous conllict is that he
overestimates his trend toward security to such a degree that he even comes
to believe that he can experience the living world with the same method.
This mistake has created the catastrophe which we feel now and which we
fear if we once begin to be aware that it may be the earmark of any culture
and particularly of our own. This general consideration was the basis of my
urge to find a better method for understanding the behavior of living beings
and of sick people in the attempt to help them.
The result of my experiences was that natural science presupposes the
living world but the living world is not the world of natural science. Knowl-
edge of the latter, however important it may be, represents only one aspect
of the living world. Indeed, to be scientific we always have to begin our work
with the quantitative method of natural science since it alone gives our knowl-
edge the order we need. This order can be gained only by the experience
of beginning with the isolated stimuli which issue from ourselves and from
the world. We call this process "perception," in which phenomena have to
be taken much more holistically than is usually done. With this experience
we build a definite concept of the nature of the scientific natural world and
so also of the living organism. But one should never forget that, by this pro-
cedure, "thinking" enters into natural science only when it can be used for
guaranteeing order. The world of natural science is an abstraction, a creation
of man in which directly experienced objects do not exist, or better, exist
only in the abstraction of natural science statements; such a construction of
the world is not suitable for the understanding of life. It is not even able to
bring together man and world-the basis of all knowledge. The relation be-
tween man and world from both perspectives is based on adequacy, adequacy
of the happenings between man and world. In respect to this point there is
no difference between natural science and the living world; however, the
kind of adequacy in each is not the same.
The world in which we live is a much more encompassing sphere than
the world of natural science; what concerns natural science is quantitative
KURT GOLDSTEIN 155

results, whereas our living world is based upon qualitative experiences. Se-
curity needs the material world, that is, a product of the application of nat-
ural science by which the spiritual side of man is intentionally by-passed.
Existence in the living world presupposes qualitative experience, not sim-
ple "order." To understand how we can move from the quantitative results
of natural science to the qualitative activity of life is a problem that has
always caught the imagination of man. I cannot go into the details here,
but I want to emphasize that adequacy is achieved by man's creative power;
it is, so to say, a secret activity of life by which our self-realization becomes
possible. That procedure demands that we take the risk of insecurity; only
when confronted by some insecurity are we able to realize ourselves, which
means to exist.
There are two ways by which we enter into the sphere of adequacy.
One of them is language. As equivocal as language may be in relation to the
world, an example of which we have seen in our discussion of the patient
with difficulty in naming, it will nevertheless give us some key to attaining
adequacy. The other way is the "preferred behavior," which I have dealt
with in detail in The Organism. It has been my observation that the correct
performances, the ones that fulfill a particular task, are those that are per-
formed in a preferred way. We are by no means always conscious of how
we perform, but we are not unconscious of it. We are, so to say, in a sphere
which promotes correct behavior. Many experiences have taught me that
when we perform a special task correctly, the whole organism is in a "pre-
ferred condition" and we are on the way to being adequate. Neither preferred
condition nor adequacy is in itself a goal of the organism; they are but the
basis for self-realization. Adequacy represents a secret procedure of life, and
life demands it for existence. It does not occur consciously; we become aware
of it in modifying our behavior when our sense of moving in the direction
of adequacy is disturbed. We should never forget that our activities toward
self-realization are always hampered by the difficulties of life, especially by
the inlluence of the world of natural science. We have to bear these im-
perfections in our activities, as they belong to human nature.
The usefulness of the step-by-step procedure induced us to apply the
same method again and again with the same patient and with other patients
with similar symptoms that we had not fully understood before. This method
was especially elucidating because during World War I, I had an opportunity
to see the same brain-injured patients for many months and some for even
longer. After my departure from Germany, there was no contact until I went
there in 1958 to see and examine many of these patients again. In the mean-
time my findings on the same problems, for instance of speech disturbances,
were frequently published: in 1905, 1909, 1910, 1914, 1915, 1924, 1933,
1936, 1938, and 1948, until 1950, when I published a book in which I used
all the results concerning the phenomena of pathological speech, of therapy,
and of normal language.
156 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I want to mention some problems which I treated in the same manner:

the problem of localization in the brain cortex, the restitution and regulation
of defects, the problem of brain injuries (which occupied me from 1916 to
1933), and, later on, the problems of anxiety, psychophysical relationship,
abstract and Concrete behavior, consciousness and the so-called "unconscious,"
catastrophic condition, and therapy. I also deal with these problems and their
implications in my books.
When I review my scientific work I feel that I can divide it into three
periods. In the first period I was influenced, as were most physicians at that
time, by the atomistic approach of natural science. The chief problem I had
in mind in the first period of my research was that of better understanding
the symptom complexes of patients from the physiological and psychological
points of view, as well as the localization of the damage of the brain cor-
responding to the disturbed performance.
Concerning localization, I presented the result of my research of the
enormous literature available and of my own great experience in a paper
of 242 pages, in which I discussed this problem from the anatomical, psy-
chological, and clinical standpoints. I came to the conclusion that there are
no facts to justify the assumption of the localization of performance in defi-
nite regions of the brain cortex. The central nervous system represents a net-
work which is related to different peripheries in which the performances
appear to us. Wherever the damage of the brain is located, the basic function
of the brain, which we call the figure-ground function, is disturbed. This is
followed by varying symptomatology because the different functions under-
lying the performances are disturbed in differing degrees of severity by this
damage. To this corresponds a modification of a performance, better said, of
behavior, which we call, according to Hughlings Jackson's concept, "dedif-
ferentiation." The defect of a performance related to the lesion of a definite
region is determined by the influence that the disturbance of the particular
structure of the network at this place exerts on the total process of the nervous
system. Inevitably, we have to deal in all lesions with the modification of the
nervous substance. This disturbance always has the same structure in prin-
ciple, no matter which part of the nervous system is involved, be it the
cortex, subcortex, spinal cord, or the peripheral nerve. This modification
is the effect of isolation which takes place in all damage. Pathology consists
of isolation of the part of the nervous system which is damaged. When we
want to understand the defect of a performance we have to consider the
effect that isolation produces in general on the functioning of the nervous
system and especially on the particular part which is damaged. As the
observation and analysis of a great number of symptoms have taught us, the
effect of isolation differs as to extent and intensity. The symptoms that we
observe are, however, not simply the effect of the damage alone but also
of the reaction of the organism to this defect in its attempt, despite this de-
fect, to come to a new order which guarantees its existence. The remaining
KURT GOLDSTEIN 157

defect does not prevent the organism from seeking adequacy again, albeit
in a different world. This should never be forgotten in any attempt to put
performance in relation to a specific damage in the brain.
A considerable part of my research was directed toward the very com-
plicated problem of helping patients to find a new organization for their
lives. Although opposed to the theory of localization, I certainly do not
deny the significance of the brain for performance. But we cannot say that
because we find a definite defect in our performances in a definite region
of the brain, that it is in this region that the function is normally performed.
Monakow, who carried out very careful research, has protested correctly
against this. Strangely enough, one finds even in modern textbooks these
brain maps in which different functions are attributed to definite regions,
even functions that are only psychologically understandable, but not spa-
tially demonstrable.
Our main goal was and must be to better understand individual symp-
toms as an expression of dedifferentiation before we consider them at all
in relation to a definite brain function. I have tried to contribute some knowl-
edge of this in my book The Organism.
It would create the greatest difficulty if I were to assume that the prob-
lem of psychophysical unity should be thought of as being directly related
to brain function. Our observations of normal and pathological behavior have
taught us that the activities of the organism cannot be understood as effects
of fixed patterns of reaction to stimuli coming from the outside or inside, as
was generally assumed in mechanical concepts, such as reflexes, drives, in-
stincts, or will.
The assumption of these agencies is untenable. The activities of the
normal and pathological organism can be understood only if looked upon as
determined by the basic trend of the organism, the trend to realize itself in
the world as completely as possible under the given conditions. This situa-
tion we call "existence." This is the driving force of the organism, each of
whose activities represents a definite condition of the excitation of the
nervous system or, one could better say, of the whole organism. If it some-
times appears that the organism is under the influence of reflexes, then the
relation of the organism to the world is not in a normal condition.
The reflex and similar theories cannot be based on experimental results
because we are confronted, as in pathology, with the results of phenomena
going on in isolation. It seems .to me pertinent here to make some remarks
about the origin of the holistic approach which made such a great number
of symptoms understandable. It gave me a new impetus to study the nature of
man; some results of this study were presented in my William James Lecture
at Harvard in 1938.
The holistic approach did not originate from any idea. It was forced
upon me by concrete experience. The holistic approach was not unknown
in Germany; it had been proclaimed by such famous internists as Kraus,
158 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Krehl, Christian, and others. It was particularly Ludwig Binswanger who

dared to express similar ideas and to put the person into the center of his
concept of sickness and therapy, so giving meaning to psychological and
physiological phenomena. One might think that Freud's concept was not
far from this, but the introduction of rellexes, drives, and instincts made
Freud's use of it more than doubtful. The work of the famous English
neurologist, Hughlings Jackson, could have been very important, but was
very little known, particularly in Germany, until after the First World War
when his pupil, Henry Head, published his work about aphasia in which
he followed Jackson's concepts. Those few who accepted Jackson's concepts
in principle were not yet ready to consider the concept of the organism as a
whole, not even so far as he went concerning the functions of the brain. For
a considerable time I was nearly alone among the neurologists in my con-
sistently holistic approach. In 1932 about twenty physicians, famous in their
special fields, arranged a meeting in Austria at which they developed in prin-
ciple similar holistic ideas in connection with material pertaining to their
respective specialties. For the first time at this meeting I presented my con-
cept and became more convinced that I should continue examining and treat-
ing patients in my own way.
I was still more encouraged when I learned that my basic concept
was much in accordance with the theoretical interpretation of the French
physiologist Claude Bernard, as published in his An Introduction to the
Study of Experimental Medicine (1866). Claude Bernard, as famous as he
was in Germany for his medical discoveries, was to me and most other phy-
sicians there completely unknown for his theoretical interpretation, which
he had developed from his practical work. Some of his comments may illus-
trate his point:

In the organism of the living being we have to consider an ensemble, a harmony

of phenomena, an individual. One should always return to this ensemble before
one draws definite conclusions . . . One should see without doubt that the parts
which constitute the organism are inseparable in the physiological sense . . . The
physiologist and the physician should always consider at the same time the or-
ganism and its ensemble and other details ... Living is a contact between the
organism and the outer world, if one suppresses the one or the other of the two
conditions, life ceases ... All theories grew out directly from the practical ex-
perience.

It was particularly interesting for me that Claude Bernard was inclined

to philosophical deliberations in practical work as much as he was strictly
against confusing philosophical concepts. He wrote, "If new discoveries will
help us to understand life better, that would not modify our attitude towards
what philosophy means in the biological sciences, namely an intrinsic factor
of knowledge." When I read that, I felt at home.
It was of particular significance for the further development of my re-
 KURT GOLDSTEIN 159

search to find that brain damage could produce a change of behavior in its
totality in a characteristic way. This observation induced us to distinguish
two forms of behavior in man, which we called <labstract attitude" and "con-
crete behavior." Briefly, we can say that the abstract attitude is necessary for
taking a mental set voluntarily, for shifting voluntarily from one aspect of an
object to another, for making a choice, grasping the essential part of a given
presentation, planning ahead, assuming an attitude to the merely possible,
and finally detaching the ego from the outer world. When we find a failure
in any performance belonging to one of these groups, we are able to assume
that the patient will fail in all performance fields where this attitude is
needed. In concrete behavior our reactions and thinking are directed by
the immediate claims or a particular aspect of an object or a situation. The
patient with impairment of the abstract attitude may behave correctly in
all performances that can be executed with concrete behavior. It is under-
standable that many symptoms may be wrongly interpreted if one neglects
this possible origin of the defect. This origin of a defect can be easily
evaluated because the tests we have developed can demonstrate directly that
the abstract attitude is impaired and so facilitate investigation. Many phe-
nomena that were previously interpreted as a special defect, for instance
defect of memory and attention, should be regarded with doubt; they may
instead be the effect of failure in abstract attitude.
The symptoms that we find in a defect of the concrete behavior appear,
for instance, as a failure of the motor-sensory performances and to these
belong simple motor aphasia and similar symptom complexes. I do not con-
sider it necessary to say here anything more about concrete behavior. It is
more important to look carefully at patients who show abnormally strong
concreteness. This can have two different causes. One is the lack of mental
development in infancy. The abstract attitude normally develops before the
end of the first year. In some children it does not develop in a normal way
and in others only very belatedly. It is understandable that these infants are
struck by catastrophe when the world around them imposes tasks with which
they cannot cope. Then they withdraw into concrete behavior, the sole way
in which they can protect themselves against catastrophe. If the infant main-
tains concreteness as a habit, which can occur under different circumstances
( which I cannot discuss here), he will readily show abnormal concreteness
later on, particularly when he is confronted with a task he has difficulty in
carrying out. This is the abnormal concreteness which, for instance, the
schizophrenic shows. The schizophrenic does not lack the abstract attitude,
but his concreteness is the only way to avoid such activities as would en-
danger him. In a similar way, the patient with brain damage sticks to con-
crete behavior which shows in perseverance and rigidity.
There are mental conditions in infancy that have been interpreted as
a psychosis resulting from an abnormal relationship between mother and
infant due to "libidinous disturbances" and that have been treated with
160 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

psychoanalysis. I demonstrated that these children have an abnormal con-

creteness due to mental underdevelopment, to a defect or a retardation of
the development of abstraction. In spite of that, in a number of publications
the condition has still been considered a psychiatric anomaly. I have no doubt
that my interpretation is correct. Careful scrutiny of the entire question by
B. Rimland (1964), based on the study of all relevant material and personal
observations, has proved my assumption. Consequently, the treatment of
these children must be changed. The explanation of the defect by our method
of investigation based not on a probable theory but on observable facts, was
successful both theoretically and practically.
Further studies have taught me that the two behavioral attitudes-
abstract and concrete behavior-belong together and that they represent a
unit in which each part plays a particular role. The abstract attitude has,
so to say, to prepare the condition in which an individual can perform a
demanded task. If for any reason an individual is forced to perform in a
situation that requires abstract attitude, he sticks to the concrete behavior.
Indeed, from what we have just said, it is clear that a task can never be
performed with concrete behavior alone.
I was able to use my results for the interpretation of the concrete be-
havior of so-called primitive societies. It had been assumed that primitive
people have inferior minds-a misconception still widely held. I thought that
their overt concreteness must have a special reason because on some occasions
they were perfectly able to use abstract attitude. The explanation came from
an observation by an anthropologist, Paul Radin, that in all primitive tribes
one can distinguish between two types: the thinkers and the nonthinkers.
The nonthinkers are competent to behave abstractly, but they frequently do
not use this attitude because their living is so organized by the thinkers that
their concrete behavior is sufficient to fulfill their tasks. As Radin says further,
they are essentially not different from the people of civilized societies. With
that, the comparison of the behavior of primitive people with that of men-
tally defective human beings, which has caused great misunderstanding of
the latter, can be rejected. Something similar takes place in our society; for
instance, if the worker in a large industrial plant, who always performs the
same concrete action, were to think about what he does, he would disrupt
the whole routine. He can fulfill his task concretely because the machines
are so constructed by the experts that the worker does not have to think
about what he is doing. He has the ability to behave abstractly but does not
use it. So we can say in general that if we see people behave very concretely,
we should not consider them abnormal; the difference between their kind
of concreteness and that of the mental patient should be distinguished.
In the third period of my research I never stopped testing the usefulness
of the holistic approach on different material. A number of papers concern-
ing a variety of neurological and psychiatric problems were the result. I con-
tinued my studies on normal and mentally ill infants. In my lectures I have
 KURT GOLDSTEIN 161

talked about Freud, but I have never written comprehensively about psycho-
analysis. I dislike discussions of theories if one is not able to know in detail
the material on which they are based; in psychoanalysis this is impossible.
Even if we have to deal basically with the same problems (as I have explained
in my paper "The Relationship of Psychoanalysis to Biology," 1929), my
observation of phenomena differs markedly from that of the analysts. My
different approach and my procedure, which is to consider the phenomena
insofar as possible without preconceived theoretical interpretation, brought
very different material to the fore. In an attempt to clarify some special prob-
lems of universal concern I have reported on anxiety, aggression, conscious-
ness, and so-called infantile sexuality (1929, 1939), which are important for
both disciplines, the holistic one and psychoanalysis.
1\1y main interest now is directed toward the problem of the relation
between biology and philosophy. I have already explained in the concluding
chapter of The Organi~m (p. 507) that my work ultimately led me into
realms far removed from the usual biological considerations. I expressed the
hope that the reader might realize this and see that transition into philo-
sophical problems is not determined by the casual personal inclination of
the author but that the material itself imposes the obligation upon us if we
desire to find our way through. This became apparent first in the presenta-
tion of language in my book Language and Language Disturbances (1948)
and gave me additional impetus to study the problem of the relation between
man and world and, in turn, of the relationship among the parts of the
organism. Here it was particularly the problem of the tendency of the parts
to come together in units. How do these units originate? This intriguing
question has vexed me in all my attempts to understand organismic behavior,
such as my study of the development of the corpus callosum in the brain.
It occupied me from my study of the much discussed problem of stimulus-
response to the attempt to understand the highest mental phenomenon, the
building of concepts; it occupied me especially in my consideration of the
problem of the categorical attitude, which is of such importance in acquiring
knowledge in general and also in biology.
I can refer here only briefly to the problem of categories. The men-
tioned behavior forms have usually been considered as the effect of the use
of the mental capacity of a subject. I came to the conclusion that they are
not determined by consciousness and that it would be meaningless to call
them unconscious. They represent living events and are not the result of
intellectual activities. I could no longer accept the assumption that experience
is the product of mind or brain functions alone, especially after it became
my conviction that the external world is always connected with it.
Pathology has shown how important the world is for the understanding
of anything at all. Man cannot live without world and world does not
exist without man. The study of the world of the brain-injured proved to be
no less important to our knowledge than the study of the disturbance of the
162 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

performance. Indeed, though the patient's behavior is certainly determined

by the brain defect, it can only be understood as a phenomenon going on
in the totality of his modified personality in relation to the world.
The holistic approach induced me to bring psychophysical relationship
into the foreground. It became obvious that it was directed by the tendency
to corne to terms with the world in which the individual feels he lives.
There are two different behavior forms in his being in the "man-world"
entity. We start an activity with the abstract attitude if the concrete way is
not forced upon us (see what I have said before concerning the behavior
form of primitive people, p. 160). When in a given condition the abstract
attitude does not occur, e.g., in brain defect or in anxiety, then the concrete
behavior comes to the fore. The patient sticks to that which brings him into
a feeling of adequacy. What we call categories are living events that are
effective. The patient experiences either success or failure; we describe this
behavior in our terms. In either case, the adequacy between him and the
world can corne to pass. When he is not able to achieve adequacy in one
form or the other, then something occurs which we call catastrophe. This is
a condition in which there is no adequacy possible, the situation which is
characteristic of anxiety, as I have shown in various papers. As we have said,
the patient does not experience catastrophe when we have arranged his world
in such a way that he can behave concretely or, as sometimes may happen,
when he has learned from indications to recognize how to come to terms in
this concrete way. He is generally not able to learn from indications because
due to his impairment he cannot make a choice. For him there does not exist
the possibility of trial and error. If he has found the right way, he is simply
living in what is for him an adequate condition. He is always, except in
catastrophe, living in adequacy. What is going on in his behavior is so com-
plex that only by the most careful analysis has one a chance of explaining it.
When I learned about the approach which the philosopher Edmund
Husserl, who has gained increasing acceptance in recent years, had taken
toward knowledge, I felt vaguely that my interpretation of the behavior of
patients may prove to be similar to the results of "phenomenological analysis."
My presentiment was confirmed when I read the essays of some of Husserl's
adherents, who not only showed great interest in our material and interpreta-
tion concerning abstract and concrete behavior but found it important for
their own philosophical inquiries. I would like to mention particularly Pro-
fessor Aaron Gurwitsch, the late Professor Alfred Schutz, and the late French
philosopher Merleau-Ponty. Gurwitsch (1964) writes: "Husser! had nat-
urally to engage himself in a thoroughgoing analysis and discussion of the
theories of abstraction and refuted the empiristic theory of abstraction," a
theory which I, too, was unable to accept from my view of behavior. Hus-
serl's results, continues Gurwitsch, have been confirmed by Goldstein and
Gelb's studies of brain-injured people. "This appears the more significant
and conclusive because their findings were investigated with a mere neuro-
KURT GOLDSTEIN 163

logical and psychopathological setting and in complete independence of a

phenomenological point of view" CGurwitsch, 1964). Without going into
detail, I want to mention some of HusserI' s results that seemed to be in
particular agreement with results I arrived at by my analysis of human beings.
For instance, he states that:

. . . the Lebenswelt (living world) is of a common occurrence, it is present and

pregiven, it is the natural everyday life, it includes nature, this nature is given
in direct experience not in idealized nature like in Natural Science. Within the
Lebenswelt we encounter our fellowmen and take it for granted that we do not
only exist in the same world but are concretely confronted with the same things
as the others. All theoretical truth, logic, mathematics, science . . . finds its
validity and justification in evidence concretely occurring in the Lebenswelt.

To that correspond the insights I gained in my attempt to understand

biology. The great importance that Husserl gives to the problem of the re-
lationship between events interested me greatly. This problem, which played
an enormous part in philosophy and carne to the fore in a new way in
phenomenology, became the focus of the phenomenologists' interest in my
work on abstract and concrete behavior and of my interest in Husserl's in-
quiries.
I shall close this presentation with some remarks on sickness and therapy.
I started this biography with the confession that my basic inclination was
to help people in their distress, especially patients. In my endeavor I came
to see that man is not perfect and that he has to arrange his life with aware-
ness of the difficulties which arise from his nature. Try as he will and should
to be perfect, he has to bear imperfection. That concerns also the physician's
attitude toward sickness and his procedure in therapy, because the sick indi-
vidual and the physician are in a similar situation. The latter must, if he
wants to eliminate the remaining effect of the sickness, help the patient to
understand the human situation and let him feel that therapy is an enter-
prise between the two. Sickness cannot be understood correctly if one as-
sumes that it is something that befalls the individual from the outside. Our
task is not simply to eliminate the disturbance or fight the effect of the sick-
ness. Sickness seen from a higher aspect has to be considered as a disturbance
of the relation between man and world, a disorder involving both. The
patient primarily experiences his overt distress, but what is more important is
that he is so much incapacitated to come to terms with the world in an
adequate way that he becomes u~able to realize himself. He feels, so to
speak, that he is not able "to be," and that shows in anxiety. He will feel
recovered and healthy when disorder and anxiety have disappeared. But this
can be achieved in some sicknesses only when he is able to bear some dis-
tress. In such cases it will depend on how much distress and anxiety the
individual is able to bear in order to reach a situation where life is still worth
living.
164 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

It is then the essential task of the physician to help the patient to find
the necessary new orientation toward life that acknowledges restriction. This
will be possible only when the physician has gained deep insight into the
structure of the personality of the patient, bodily and psychologically. This
feeling of a common enterprise develops a kind of communion between
patient and physician, it develops in a sphere of immediacy which I have
written about elsewhere. In this sphere grows that which I have called trans-
ference (which differs from Freud's concept of transference). My concept
of it originated in my organismic approach to the study of behavior in gen-
eral; it arose from my experience in treating brain-injured patients with whom
I could achieve success in this way. I wrote a comprehensive paper on the
way in which this transference has to be executed in different diseases. Ac-
cording to my conviction, we should always be aware of imperfection, our
action will always exceed our knowledge. It is for this reason that the prob-
lem of free decision enters into the activity of the physician. The situation
becomes more difficult because the decision of the patient himself cannot
he disregarded. This often occurs, not only when, for instance, an operation
becomes necessary and a decision is demanded of the patient; there are other
times, too, when he has to choose between restriction of his freedom and
greater suffering. It is clear that we are not to take this as an external
alternative-rather it touches, as one might say, on an existential question
that can never be avoided by the physician. How will a physician be able to
advise and direct? In any case, he will be able to do so only if he is convinced
that it concerns the coming to terms of two persons in their attempt to help
each other. In this extraordinary event, which happens much more often
than one is aware of, the contrast between the factors in the medical situa-
tion and the objective procedures of natural science becomes strikingly
apparent.

REFERENCES 1

Selected Publications by Kurt Goldstein

Studies on the development of the human brain II: first development of the great
brain commissures and the growing together of thalamus and striatum. Beitrage
zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des menschlichen Gehirns II: die erste Entwicklung
der grossen Hirncommissuren und die Verwachsung von Thalamus und Stri-
atum.) Arch. Anatom. Physiol., Anatom. Abteil., 1903, 29-60.
The problem of amnesic aphasia. (Zur Frage der amnestischen Aphasie.) Arch.
Psychiat., 1905, 41.
Theory of hallucinations. (Zur Theorie der Halluzinationen.) Arch. Psychiat.
Nervenkrankh., 1908,44,584-655; 1036-1100.
1 A complete bibliography of Dr. Goldstein's publications has been compiled by
Joseph Meiers, M.D., 601 West 115th Street, New York City, and is available on
request to Dr. Meiers.
KURT GOLDSTEIN 165

On disturbances in the grammar of cases with cerebral injuries. (Ober Storungen

der Grammatik bei Hirnkranken.) Mschr. Psychiat. Neurol., 1913.
The brain-injured soldiers: therapy, social care and experts evaluation. (Die Be-
handlung, Ficrsorge und Begutachtung des hirnverletzten Soldaten.) Leipzig:
F. C. W. Vogel, 1919.
(with A. Gelb) On the influence of the impairment of visual image on tactile
recognition. (Uber den EinRuss des Verlustes des optischen Vorstellungsver-
mogens auf das taktile Erkennen.) Z. Psychol., 1919, 83, 1-94.
Dependence of motility upon visual processes. (Ober die Abhangigkeit der Be-
wegungen von optischen Vorgangeri.) Mschr. Psychol. Neurol., 1923, LIV.
The homologous functional cause of symptoms in organic and mental diseases,
especially about the functional mechanism of compulsion. (Ober gleichartige
funktionelle Bedingtheit der Symptornc bei organischen und psychischen Krank-
heiten; im besonderen tiber den funktionellen Mechanismus der Zwangs-
vorgange.) Mschr. Psychiat. Neurol., 1924, LVII (4), 191-209.
(with A. Gelb) On aphasia of color names. (Ober Farbennamenaphasie.) Psychol.
Forsch., 1924, 6, 127-186.
The cerebellum. (Das Kleinhirn.) In Bethe (Ed.), Handbuch der normalen und
pathologischen Physiologie, 1926, X.
On aphasia. (Uber Aphasie.) Schweizer Arch. Neurol. Psychiat., 1927.
Localization in the cerebrum. (Lokalization und Grosshirn.) In Handbuch der
normalen und pathologischen Physiologie. Berlin: Springer, 1927.
The tendency to preferred behavior. (uber die Tendenz zum ausgezeichneten
Verhalten.) Dtsch. Z. Nervenheilk., 1929, 109 0), 1-61.
The relationship of psychoanalysis to biology. (Die Beziehungen der Psychoanalyse
zur Biologie.) Bericht auf dem II aIIgemeinen Medizinischen Treffen fur Psy-
chotherapie in Nauheim, April 1927. Al1g. iirztliche Z. Psychiat., Leipzig:
Hirzel, 1929.
The holistic approach to medicine. (Die Ganzheitliche Betrachtung in der Medi-
cin.) In Einheitsbestrebungen in der Medicin, 1930.
Pointing and grasping. (Ober Zeigen und Greifen.) Nervenarzi, 1931, 4, 453-
466.
The mind-body problem and its significance for medical action. (Das psycho-
physische Problem in seiner Bedeutung fur arztliches Handeln.) Ther. Gegenw.,
1931,72,1-11.
The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data
in man. (Der Aufbau des Organismus: Eine Einleitung in die Biologie auf
Grund der Eriahrungen beim kranken Menschen.) Holland: Nijhoff, 1934.
(English translation) The organism. New York: American Book, 1938; intro-
duction by K. Lashley. (French translation) La structure de l'organisme. Texte
augmente de fragments inedits et traduits de l'allemand par Ie Dr. E. Burckhard
et Jean Kuntz, Paris: Gallimard, 1951. (paperback in English) Boston: Beacon
Press, 1963.
The problem of the meaning of words based upon observation of aphasic patients.
]. Psychol., 1936, 2, 301-315.
Human nature in the light of psychopathology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1940.
(paperback ed.) New York: Schocken Books, 1963. Published also in Japanese.
166 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(with E. Rothmann) Physiognomic phenomena in rorschach responses. Rorschach

Res., 1945, IX, No.1.
(with M. Scheerer and E. Rothmann) A case of "idiot savant": an experimental
study of personality organization. Psychol. Monogr., 1945, 58, No.4.
Language and language disturbances. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1948. (Span-
ish translation) Trastornos del lenguaje: Las afasias su importancia para la
medicina y la teoria del lengua;e. Barcelona, Madrid: Editorial Cientifico
Medica, 1950.
Remarques sur le probleme episternologique de la biologie. Translated by Simone
et Georges Canguilhem. (Read in absentia at the Conference on Epistemology,
Fall, 1949.) In Actes du congres international de philosophie des sciences,
Paris, 1949; Vol. I, Epistemologie, Paris, J951, 141-143.
On emotions: considerations from the organismic point of view. ]. of Psychol.,
1951, 31, 37-49.
The concept of transference in treatment of organic and functional nervous dis-
eases. Acta Psychotherapeut., 1954, 2, Fasc. 3/4.
The smiling of the infant and the problem of understanding the "other". J. of
Psychol., 1957, 44, 175-191.
New ideas on mental health (Cooper Union Lecture). In J. Fairchild (Ed.),
Personal problems and psychological frontiers. New York: Sheridan Press, 1957,
96 fl.
Concerning "primitivity": the problem of the lower mentality of primitive people.
In Essays in honor of Paul Radin: culture in history. New York: Columbia,
1960.

Other Publications Cited

Bernard, Claude. An introduction to the study of experimental medicine, 1866.

(Paperback ed.) Dover, 1957.
Binswanger, Ludwig. Grundformen des menschlichen Daseins. Zurich: Niehaus
Verlag, 1942.
Gurwitsch, Aaron. Fields of consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1964.
Head, Henry. Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech. New York: Hafner, 1926.
2 vols.
Husser!, Edmund. Die Krise der europaeischen Wissenschaften.
Jackson, Hughlings. Affection of speech from disease of the brain. Brain, 1878,
I,304.
---. Croanian lectures on the evolution and dissolution of the nervous sys-
tem. London: Lancet, 1884.
Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities, 1962.
Radin, Paul. Essays in honor of Paul Radin: culture in history. New York: Co-
lumbia, 1960.
Rimland, B. Infantile autism. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964.
Schuetz, Alfred. Collected papers. Holland: Nijhoff, 1962.
167
Joy Paul Guilford
What is a life-a sequence of personal events, of birth, school, marriage
and parenthood, work, retirement, and death? I recall one time hearing
Charlotte Buhler defend the thesis that, in effect, a life is like a symphony;
it has a central theme, with variations on that theme. There is a strong fea-
ture of unity about it.
Looking backward, it is sometimes possible to see the threads that seem
to Follow through, although often in winding fashion. If our genes do pro-
vide a kind of life program, certainly it is a program subject to many revi-
sions, as environmental opportunities, or lack thereof, have their say.
If a life is a kind of symphony, an autobiography is written about an
unfinished symphony, and it gives only one rendering or interpretation. In
what follows, I shall start along chronological lines, but when it comes to
matters of career, I shall attempt to follow some of the threads of psycho-
logical interest and to inject as much unity into the picture as seems justified.
The reader may be able to judge whether there is a central theme.

BIRTH AND FAl\lILY

The record is that I began breathing on March 7, 1897. I have often

wondered whether I had an unconscious memory of being born, for during
childhood, a number of times I had a terrifying dream of being trapped in a
tight-fitting, curved, underground passage from which it was difficult to
escape. Consciously, I have always had more than a touch of claustrophobia.
I could not bring myself to crawl through tunnels or under buildings as other
children did.
The locale of my first contact with the external environment was on a
farm, about five miles from the village of Marquette, in Hamilton County,
Nebraska. My sure knowledge of ancestry does not go back beyond my grand-
parents, only one of whom I knew personally. 1\1)' father, Edwin Augustus
Guilford, and mv mother, Arvilla Monroe, came from farmer parentage.
Recent generations had been on the move from Michigan, where both par-
ents and grandparents had been born, to Iowa then to Nebraska, where my
169
 170 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

father, two of his brothers, and their father took neighboring homesteads in
the 1880's. Another brother became a railroad engineer. Both my parents
had been limited to a grade-school education. I recall a bit of shock on learn-
ing indirectly that my father and mother were Iirst cousins (as were their
brother and sister, respectively), both having the same Monroe ancestry,
presumably going back to the Monroe clan of Scotland. The Guilford an-
cestry was undoubtedly English. The Corey blood on my mother's side was
probably Irish.
Of quite a number of first cousins of my generation, few went to high
school. Three of the female gender taught school temporarily. One of the
male gender attended engineering college until an accidental death. There
was one of my father's cousins who achieved the status of a bishop in a
minor church denomination. Another cousin ended his years as a paranoid
patient. He was the most colorful relative I knew.
Although my father rented his farm (he had lost ownership in the
drought of 1894), I am sure that he was above the average farmer in intel-
ligence and in managerial ability. He was a leader in his church and com-
munity, having taken an active part in organizing and maintaining a farmers'
cooperative. There were few skills needed on the farm that he would not
undertake to acquire. For example, he did creditably in planning new build-
ings, laying foundations, carpentry and even amateur veterinary practice
including surgery on farm animals. He was very uncommunicative and stern
and the one who punished, which set the pattern for my reactions to all
those in authority over me.
By community standards, our family would have been regarded as
neither poor nor well-to-do. It was one of the nrst in the community to own
a family automobile, a 1912 Studebaker. My parents set quite a religious
atmosphere in the home and saw to it that the family attended the rural
United Brethren church regularly. My mother was discontented with farm
living and frequently let it be known. After retiring from the farm at the age
of sixty, my father served several years as deputy county sheriff.
A brother more than five years older than I and a sister almost two
years younger completed the family. The most significant relationship to my
brother was that he was assigned as my protector, and the relationship to
my sister was one of sibling rivalry. My brother was low on academic ability
and did not Iinish grade school, but he was high on drawing skill and in
mechanical ability. With his sense of humor and some creative talent, I am
sure that he had potential for the art of cartooning. He took a course in auto
mechanics and that was his chief type of employment. After finishing grade
school, my sister took business-college training and spent a few years before
marriage as a bank clerk. It may have been some of the obvious differences
in various abilities in my own family that later helped to turn my attention
to problems of differential psychology during my professional career.
 JOY PAUL GUILFORD 171

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

On the farm I had the usual tasks that fall to the growing boy. With
the example set by my parents, I learned not to be afraid of hard work and
long hours. Compared with other children, I seem to have been unusually
observant of natural phenomena of every kind, and I spent an unusual pro-
portion of my time reading. I also did some short-story writing and several
times won prizes in the form of books from an Omaha newspaper. I started
lessons on the piano at seven, continuing irregularly for a number of years,
but never became a good piano player. One or two efforts at composing and
at writing poetry were dismal failures never attempted again. I was thus
prepared for the recent finding that creative potential depends upon the area
in which one would be creative.
My other musical activities included singing in church choirs and in
a college chorus and playing the saxophone badly during college days. My
love of music (which favors subclassical types) is an aspect of a general
aesthetic interest. On the Kuder Preference Record my highest score is on
the artistic scale, and on the Strong Vocational Interest Blank my score is
highest for architect as well as for psychologist. Architecture or landscape
gardening would have been a most appealing occuption for me, but I lack
some of the important pertinent abilities, such as drawing ability. My chief
hobbies for years have been gardening and color photography.
As a boy, I enjoyed fishing, swimming, and skating, but not hunting
and not competitive sports, in which I had little basis for success. Our home
possessed an excellent tool shop and I devoted some time to constructing
things but never was skilled or much interested in mechanical activities. My
disinterest in mechanics increased with the years and is probably a major
reason for preferring statistical studies over laboratory studies that involve
equipment.
According to family policy, I started to school at the age of seven; on
my seventh birthday, in fact, although less than two months remained in
the school year. During the first full year of school, I advanced through the
"third reader," and it was not long until I was helping my older brother
with his arithmetic problems. Of the elementary subjects, I liked arithmetic
and physiology best. At the age of eleven, I attempted most of the county
eighth-grade examinations and passed them. The following year I passed all
of them. Because of my age and the distance to high school, however, I re-
turned to the rural school for "postgraduate" study.
My first semester of high school was spent at the village school in
Marquette, living at home. I then transferred to the high school in the
county seat, Aurora, living with relatives and family friends at various times.
172 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I graduated in 1914 as class valedictorian in a class of forty-five, having

earned an average grade higher than ninety-six percent. Such a level of
achievement was not maintained later in college, partly because I placed less
emphasis upon getting grades and asserted some degree of independence in
some courses, a trend that was to grow through graduate work. I very easily
made election to Phi Beta Kappa, however.
In high school the science curriculum was rich, with courses in physical
geography, botany, physics, and chemistry, all of which I took. The teaching
was excellent. I do not think that I really disliked any subject unless it was
second-year Latin. During my junior year, I undertook the program of com-
mercial courses in addition to the academic program. During my senior year,
I took the additional subject of "normal training," with the prospect of be-
coming a teacher.
It was in the normal training that I first became acquainted with psy-
chology as a subject. The teacher had recently studied psychology at the
state university and taught us some of it with great enthusiasm. I obtained
books by William James from the town library and read much from them.
I then realized that some observations that I had made in earlier years were
actually psychological observations. For example, I had noticed some phe-
nomena of binocular vision and other visual-perceptual phenomena. The be-
havior of farm animals and of wildlife had also provided sources of observa-
tion. I had also obtained published material on hypnotism and had found it
exciting. Perhaps this was part of a pattern of interest in things bordering
on the magical. I found fairy tales, stories of Greek mythology, and the
Arabian Nights' tales fascinating, and to this day I am not in sympathy with
those who would keep such imaginative literature away from children. The
rural school that I had attended, curiously, had a good selection of such
reading material, as well as the Lambs' tales from Shakespeare.
Upon graduation from high school, because of my relative youth, I did
not secure a teaching position during the first year, nor were funds avail-
able for entrance into college. The next year I taught in a rural school near
Phillips, Nebraska. The following year, I taught in grades five through eight
in the Phillips village school.

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
In the fall of 1917, I entered the University of Nebraska. It was a keen
disappointment not to be permitted to take psychology in the freshman year.
For my science requirement, I registered for a course in chemistry known as
qualitative analysis. The teacher was one of the most uninteresting that I
ever knew. And yet, his way of thinking and his way of quizzing were
thought-provoking. The laboratory work was well planned and appealed to
me so much that I decided to become a chemist.
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 173

A course during the freshman year that left a lasting impression on me

was in world history, called "The Growth of a World Society," taught by
Fred Morrow Fling. For some years, this foresighted historian had been
pointing out the inevitability of a world organization. For the first time, I
saw the function of the study of history-to make human life more intel-
ligible, to give the student deeper roots, and to provide him with a time
perspective. The part of the course that influenced me most, however, was
the "laboratory" work, in which we went through the process of writing
the history of a day during the French revolution. We learned how to find
source material, how to evaluate it, how to know when a historical fact may
be regarded as established, and how to write and document an organized
report. I detested the dictatorial manner and methods of the teacher and the
laboratory assistant and would have dropped the course in the middle of the
year but for the intervention of a dean. I was glad that I had to stay with
the course, for I have since realized that one of the most useful things stu-
dents can be taught is method.
During my freshman year, I joined a local social fraternity, which a
few years later became a chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha. This experience made
an important contribution to my social development, but it could not make
up for all previous retardation in this respect.
The summer of 1918 was spent on my father's farm. Facing the prospect
of military draft, I volunteered and entered a training detachment that was
being trained for service in the Signal Corps at the Kansas State Agricul-
tural College. For three months we studied radio and the physics basic
thereto. I was under orders to proceed with officer training at Yale Uni-
versity when the Armistice came about.
I did not return to the University to complete the academic year 1918-
19. Instead, I took a temporary teaching position in grades seven and eight
at Hooper, Nebraska, where an Army buddy was teaching. That summer
the county superintendent of schools in my native county asked me to serve
as acting superintendent while he took the summer off. I returned to the
University in the fall of 1919.
During my sophomore year, my educational objective was in the direc-
tion of public-school teaching as a career. I took some courses in education,
and to supplement my income I did some teaching for pay in the University
demonstration high school. I taught general science during the first semester
and physics during the second. This supervised teaching was beneficial.
I had not given up the idea of a chemistry major, and thus enrolled in
a course in organic chemistry. Although the teaching in both lecture and
laboratory was excellent, my interests in chemistry were waning. The de-
tails of complex molecular structures were not particularly appealing. I did
not complete the full year in organic chemistry; instead, during the second
semester I enrolled in a course in introductory zoology, which contributed to
background for psychology later.
 174 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Being a sophomore, I was permitted to enter the course in beginning

psychology, which was a year course with laboratory. To my deep regret,
the great teacher Harry Kirk Wolfe, who had taken his doctorate with
Wundt, had died. The course did not impress me very favorably during the
first semester. The emphasis was on neural anatomy and physiology. The
laboratory work was devoted to dissection of sheep's brains. This was not the
psychology that I had anticipated. The second semester's work was more
interesting, to which Carl Seashore's laboratory manual contributed a great
deal.
Toward the end of the school year, I happened to be talking with the
teacher in the course, Winifred F. Hyde. I was remarking that I should
probably have to take the next year off to teach in order to be able to finance
further study at the University. Dr. Hyde asked me whether I would be
able to continue next year if given an assistantship in psychology. This
came as a surprise, particularly since assistantships were given only to grad-
uate students. I eagerly accepted, and during the two remaining undergrad-
uate years I taught laboratory and quiz sections in general psychology.
Undoubtedly, this experience determined my choice of a major and a career.
Without the continued aid and encouragement of Winifred F. Hyde, I
should probably not have seen my chosen training through. Incidentally,
fellow assistants during my tenure in this status included Frederick H. Lund
and Arthur T. Jersild, who later became recognized psychologists, and Samuel
Brownell, who later became distinguished in the field of education.
I have often thought it unfortunate for my further academic develop-
ment that, since psychology at the University of Nebraska was regarded
as an adjunct to philosophy, I was guided into philosophy courses when I
should have been taking courses in mathematics. I did have the opportunity
to extend my scientific background by taking a course in optics (after a
year of college physics) and a course in genetics. My mathematical experi-
ence as an undergraduate was limited to algebra and trigonometry, neither
of which was very exciting, in contrast to my three years of mathematics in
high school.
I sought to round out my psychology program by taking a course in
social psychology in the sociology department under a professor who was
said to have more than a local reputation. This was one of the easiest courses
that I ever took. The teacher spent the entire semester discussing a few
chapters from the textbook in a very elementary way, much to my disgust.
I chose a course in argumentation, chiefly because of the reputation of
the teacher, M. M. Fogg (not an apt name for one who coached debating
teams), and was greatly rewarded. I learned how to marshal and organize
arguments in support of propositions. The orderly thinking of the teacher
and the logical nature of the subject appealed to me very much. My term
paper was a defense for using academic-aptitude tests for university students.
From this course, and from other experiences, I have concluded that the
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 175

choice of teacher is frequently more important for the student's development

than the choice of course.
At the end of my senior year, an opportunity came for me to teach
in the 1922 summer session at the Peru (Nebraska) State Normal School.
It happened that I was the only assistant in the laboratory and the only
one who could be reached on the Saturday morning that the president of
the school came looking for a last-minute replacement. I taught three sec-
tions of beginning psychology, with laboratory-and sheep's brains. My as-
sistant was Erland N. P. Nelson, who later joined the ranks of psychologists.
The next academic year I returned as a graduate assistant but with
added duties. It happened that one of the psychology teachers, C. O. Weber,
obtained a leave of absence to take postdoctoral work at Harvard University,
leaving the psychology clinic unprovided for. I was asked whether I would
take charge of the clinic, which I did; an arrangement that extended into a
second year.
1\1y preparation for the role of clinical psychologist was severely lim-
ited. I had had one course on intelligence testing and some limited instruc-
tion on remedial procedures in connection with a course in educational
psychology. Fortunately, my predecessor had left records and literature in
such excellent shape that I could see what his operations had been. I read
the pertinent sources, which in those days were not very extensive, and by
self-instruction learned to administer all the necessary tests. The chief source
of "clients" was the State Home for Dependent Children, which wanted
advice on the disposition of children coming under its supervision. Other
sources were the local juvenile court, seeking information on cases informally,
and occasionally the school psychologist in the Lincoln public schools, who
asked for assistance on certain cases. Altogether, I handled over a hundred
cases during the two years.
This clinical experience provided excellent laboratory instruction for
a graduate student. Observation of the children's behavior in response to
psychological tests, particularly the performance tests, impressed me with
the rich possibilities that were being missed by summarizing all the informa-
tion in terms of mental age and IQ. The results from llD cases were sys-
tematically recorded and statistically summarized as a basis for my master's
thesis entitled "Some Problems Encountered in the Clinical Examination of
Children." This thesis emphasized the limitations of information provided
by the IQ and urged a much more analytical assessment of individuals.
Only a few university students came to the clinic, some out of curiosity
and some with questions about vocational fitness and personality traits. J n
this connection, I did some preliminary experimenting with the Downey
Will Temperament Test, which was new at the time. I also spent some time
in drawing up a list of abilities and other traits that might be evaluated in
order to achieve a comprehensive assessment of an individual, with an effort
to keep the traits as nearly independent of one another as possible. When
 176 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

writing my book Personality (1959a) years later, I regretted that I had not
saved the list for comparative purposes.
Other experiences during my four years as assistant (during the fourth
year I held the rank of assistant instructor) had their inlluences on the
direction of my professional interests. The period shortly after the wartime
success with the Army Alpha Examination saw a growing experimental use
of academic-aptitude tests. I assisted the head of psychology in administering
and scoring the Army Alpha and the E. L. Thorndike battery of aptitude
tests to entering freshmen classes and in dealing with the data from those
sources.
During one year, the head of the chemistry department asked us to
develop a battery of tests that would assist in the classification of students
in two beginning chemistry courses. Most of this task fell to me. It provided
my first occasion for test construction and research. In this connection it was
necessary for me to learn something about statistical methods. I had taken
one graduate course in educational measurement, which was on statistics,
but it was unbelievably elementary and I learned very little from it. Most
of the statistics that I have learned, then and since, has been self-taught.
A report on the classification of chemistry students by means of tests con-
stituted my first publication, produced jointly with Winifred F. Hyde (1925).
In my clinical experience, the conviction grew that there is a multi-
plicity of abilities, not just one-intelligence. As an assistant in the laboratory,
I obtained permission to introduce as one exercise a battery of ten word-
association tests (the Woodworth and Wells series) along with a simple-
reaction-time test for the purpose of obtaining intercorrelations. I had certain
a priori hypotheses as to the involvement of three abilities: a reaction-time
component and two association-ability components, one having to do with
stimuli that converge on one or a limited repertoire of responses (as in giving
class names) and the other pertaining to tasks in which the stimulus has a
relatively large number of possible responses (as in giving class members).
The distinction may have been the seed from which my later distinction
between convergent and divergent production came. At any rate, the inter-
correlations differed systematically and somewhat as expected. I had heard
of Spearman's g at that time but not about his method of factor analysis. I
was to do my first factor analysis some ten years later.
In my second year of graduate work, on the basis of my one year of
experience in the clinic, I was asked to introduce a new course on abnormal
psychology. In preparation for this course I read all the available books on
Freudian psychology and on psychiatry. This course broadened considerably
my range of interests and was rcllected in some later research. I later taught
such a course at the University of Kansas and the University of Southern
California, but not in recent years.
Between the first and second years of graduate work, I obtained, through
a teachers' agency, a teaching position in the West Virginia Wesleyan sum-
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 177

mer session. In addition to beginning psychology, this position involved teach-

ing three courses in education, preparation for which kept me more than busy.
between diversions in the form of boating, fishing. and picnics with some of
West Virginia's wonderfully hospitable people. I returned for a second en-
gagement in the summer of 1925.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Through the advice and efforts of Winifred Hyde and others. I was
offered an assistantship at Cornell University to continue graduate work
under Edward Bradford Titchener. The offer was made more attractive
financially by inclusion of permission to make my living quarters in the
psychology laboratory, which was then a custom of some of the graduate
assistants, an entirely unofficial arrangement.
As assistant in the Department of Psychology at Cornell. it was my duty
to set up the demonstrations for the lectures of Titchener to sophomores in
beginning psychology and to teach quiz sections. The story of Titchener's
very dramatic lectures has been related by Boring (1927). All the psychology
staff members and the graduate students were expected to be present. Fol-
lowing the lecture. the staff members gathered with Titchener in a smoke-
filled office behind the lecture room (Titchener was noted for being liberal
with large. Filipino cigars of great potency) where for an hour discussions
were held on almost any subject. scientific or otherwise.
The atmosphere in psychology at Cornell was very different from the
philosophical and clinical milieu from which I had come. At Cornell was
a close-knit group, devoted to the development and promotion of the point
of view of a master who was both revered and feared. Previously. points of
view had meant little to me. There had been only revulsions of the phi-
losophers at Nebraska against Watson's behaviorism. Our major textbook
there had been written by Walter B. Pillsbury, who did not let any point of
view show.
1\1y attention to points of view at Cornell was further heightened by
two circumstances. A new instructor, Harry Helson, had just completed a
very scholarly dissertation at Harvard on the then new Gestalt psychology.
1\1y associations with Helson were close, and he had much influence on my
thinking on theoretical issues. A rewarding friendship was formed that has
lasted through the years. He was to influence my career in a number of
ways, as will be related. We both served as "observers" for Deane B. Judd
(now a leading authority on color problems), who was working on visual
afterimages for his doctorate in physics. In the psychological laboratory, Hel-
son and Judd were attempting to supply uniform stimulation for adaptation
of an entire retina, a study that later led to Helson's derivation of his famous
adaptation-level concept and theory.
 178 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Another circumstance during the first year at Cornell was the presence
of a visiting professor in education, not in psychology; a leader in Gestalt
psychology, Kurt Koffka, in whose seminar I enrolled for two semesters.
Koffka also gave a series of special lectures, and Wolfgang Kohler paid a brief
visit for lectures on the campus. These invasions from a divergent point of
view helped to make things interesting. Anticipations of open clashes of views
grew, when, during the second semester, Koffka attended Titchener's seminar,
as well as the entire psychology staff and Dean R. M. Ogden who had
brought Koffka to Cornell. Somehow, Titchener managed to keep open dis-
cussions of points of view below the overt level until the very last meeting
of the seminar, when a lively session lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
One experience at Cornell that affected me most was a course in psy-
chophysics under Karl M. Dallenbach. This course impressed me with the
system and precision with which psychological data could be obtained and
treated and with the fact that numerical values and mathematical functions
could be employed. I have always been fascinated with numbers and I still
enjoy operating a calculating machine. Partly because of this course and
partly because of Helson's advice, I changed from a physiology minor to a
mathematics minor. The other minor remained education. The mathematics
minor included a year course on theory of probability, which was most en-
lightening as a background for statistics.
The presence in the Department of Psychology of the office of the
American Journal of Psychology, of which Dallenbach was owner and
Titchener was editor, and a general atmosphere of research for publication
predisposed the graduate students to seek publication. Dallenbach, partic-
ularly, set for his students an example of high devotion to scientific rigor
and industry. In one of his lectures on memory, Dallenbach suggested that
a memory span could be conceived as a limen and could be measured by
utilization of the method of constant stimuli. I soon arranged to do the ex-
perimental collection of data and found that the results fully supported his
expectation. The result of this study was a joint publication in 1925.
A bit of history was entailed in the publication of this short article.
Dallenbach had reason to believe that another psychologist who specialized
in psychophysics might soon come into print with the same idea. He there-
fore urged Titchener to give some priority to publication of this article. In
reaction to this pressure, Titchener resigned as editor of the journal. Being
free from this editorial obligation, he was slated to be the first editor of the
new Journal of General Psychology, but death stepped in to change that plan.
For a dissertation topic, Titchener gave me a choice between a problem
on the skin senses and a problem on fluctuation of attention. I quickly chose
the latter. His suggestion of any problem on attention surprised me, for his
seminar had been devoted to the literature on attention to see how it was
faring as a systematic concept, with the general consensus, according to my
impression, that there was no good place for the concept in any existing
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 179

system. This outcome, too, had been a surprise, since Titchener had been
proud of his treatment of attention as a matter of sensory clearness.
My reading on the problem of fluctuations of attention led me to the
hypothesis that a fluctuating sensation under constant environmental stimu-
lation is a phenomenon of the stimulus limen. The significant feature is that
the fluctuating sensation is essentially a running picture of changing sensi-
tivity. I obtained good evidence for this proposition with respect to visual
stimuli. Subsequently, others have found the same results with respect to
auditory and tactual stimuli. Following some leads given by Dallenbach and
KoHka; I also demonstrated some of the multiple determiners of the chang-
ing sensitivity from both peripheral and central sources.
In the late summer of 1926, Helson, who had been a staff member at
the University of Illinois during the preceding academic year, had an offer
from the University of Kansas and was told that he would be released to
accept the offer if he could find a replacement. I was nominated and in-
vited to fill the vacancy (it would hardly be correct to say that I was a
replacement), which I accepted, although I had not written my dissertation.
Teaching a full load of quiz sections, laboratory sections, and during the
second semester a course on attention, I also attended graduate courses in
psychology and mathematics and wrote the dissertation, returning to Cornell
at midyear for the final oral. During the same year, I also did two experi-
mental studies, one on learning and one on the autokinetic phenomenon.
As a kind of delayed reaction to my Cornell "indoctrination," I wrote several
chapters for a general psychology textbook that was to be entirely systematic
and from the Titchenerian point of view. Realizing that it could not be a
complete psychology, I gave up the project.

FURTHER TEACHING YEARS

In the spring of 1927, I accepted for the following summer and for
the next year an appointment as assistant professor at the University of
Kansas. I was to take the place of a professor who had covered instruction
in abnormal and social psychology. In connection with the latter course, I
used F. H. Allport's Social Psychology (1924) as a text. As a class demon-
stration of perception of emotional expression, a subject given considerable
emphasis in the text, I introduced 'a class experiment on learning to read
facial expressions. A full set of more than a hundred lantern slides of the
H. Rudolf photographs happened to be available in the department to serve
as material. A report of this study was published in 1929, followed by de-
velopment, with others, of a facial model for synthesizing expressions (with
M. Wilke, 1930). Many years later, expressions were to become focal again
in a study of social-cognition abilities (with M. O'Sullivan & R. de Mille,
1965).
 180 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

At the University of Kansas I was asked to give a course to graduate

students on psychophysics and statistics. Along with Helson's continued en-
couragement, this course kept my interest alive in quantitative psychology.
The teaching of the course also revealed my weakness in statistics.
Just prior to taking up my duties at the University of Kansas, I was
married to Ruth S. Burke, whom I had met during summer sessions at
Cornell. She had completed a master's degree in psychology at Northwestern
University and most of the work for the doctorate. She has been an impor-
tant factor contributing to my progress professionally, not only in relieving
me of domestic and hscal responsibilities but also helping me in research in
the early days, from which we have a number of joint publications. One
child was born a year after our marriage, a daughter, Joan Sheridan. Joan
later earned her master's degree in psychology at the University of Southern
California, was married, and has three children. More recently she earned
the doctoral degree in industrial psychology, then served as program director
for the Los Angeles branch of the American Institutes for Research, and is
now a research scientist at Douglas Aircraft Corporation.
By the end of the academic year 1927-28, Dr. Winifred Hyde had
submitted her resignation from the University of Nebraska in order to be
married. I was invited to take her place at the rank of associate professor.
I welcomed the opportunity, recognizing the need to build up a department
of psychology that would become independent of philosophy and that should
become more equivalent in strength to those in neighboring state universities.
Within a relatively conservative setting and during depression years, this goal
was approached slowly, but within ten years the staff was tripled in size.
During an interlude of the fall semester of 1935-36, I was granted a leave
to serve as visiting professor at Northwestern University and returned there
for the following summer session.
During the semester, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit L. L.
Thurstone's evening seminar because of my strong admiration of his stimulat-
ing, trailblazing work. There were more visitors than registered students in
the seminar, among them being Marion Richardson, Harold Gulliksen, and
N. Rashevsky. Charles Spearman was visiting at the University of Chicago
at that time, and I had some delightful discussions of factor analysis with
him. This was at the time when I was writing the chapter on factor analysis
for the hrst edition of Psychometric Methods (1936). Thurstone also made
available to me facilities of his laboratory, in which Ledyard R. Tucker was
his assistant.
In 1938 I was asked to serve half time as director of the newly estab-
lished Bureau of Instructional Research at the University of Nebraska. This
agency had responsibilities for the testing of all new students, testing in the
state-wide scholarship contests, preparation of information for student ad-
visers, and conducting statistical studies. In connection with the scholarship
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 181

testing function, I took advantage of the opportunity to develop and tryout

new types of tests. Among these were a test based upon the Gottschaldt
figures and a punched-holes test for measurement of visualization, both of
which have become relatively permanent fixtures in one form or another in
the list of tests now used in research.
In 1940 I resigned from the University of Nebraska to accept an ap-
pointment as professor of psychology at the University of Southern Cali-
fornia. This change had been preceded by my teaching in the latter institu-
tion during the summers of 1938 and 1939, under pleasurable circumstances.
The opportunity to be free of administrative duties and consequent additional
time for research appealed to me, for I have never welcomed administrative
assignments, whereas research has always given me greatest satisfaction.

RESEARCH TRENDS
I have already indicated the background of some of my research ac-
tivities. It is time to take a less incidental view. During the 1930's and
since, my research interests and attention have been shaped by several de-
terminants. There was the residual interest in individual differences, aroused
by the earlier clinical experiences. In 1927 there appeared the monumental
book by Charles Spearman, The Abilities of lHan, which presented for the
first time in book form his methods of factor analysis, many results, and
much psychological theory. Here seemed to be the promise of an answer
to the problems of abilities and other traits that had been bothering me. His
emphasis on his g factor, however, left me skeptical, for it ran counter to
my own observations. The later development by Thurstone of his generalized,
multiple-factor theory and methods seemed to be more promising.
As rapidly as Thurstone developed his methods, I applied them to the
analysis of basic traits in the area of C. C. Jung's concept of introversion-
extraversion. The reasons for making this application were incidental. One
day at Cornell, Samuel Feldman, an instructor, having been reading Me-
Dougall's new Outline of Abnormal Psychology (1926), jokingly remarked
that McDougall had solved the problem of introversion-extraversion and had
developed a good test for that trait. Later, at the University of Illinois, Elmer
Culler, as his contribution to the psychology seminar, discussed Jung's new
book on the subject.
In the early days on the faculty at Nebraska, I instigated some student
research on McDougall's theory and his test, which was based upon Huctuat-
ing ambiguous figures, and other theories and tests. These studies led to the
conviction that several disparate phenomena were then erroneously regarded
as belonging under the single concept. Common American conceptions
were in general agreement that Jung's types should be regarded as opposite
 182 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

poles of a continuous dimension. It seemed obvious that factor analysis was

the way in which to determine whether there was a single dimension of
introversion-extraversion or whether more than one dimension is involved.
My first approach, a novel one at the time, was to begin the analysis
with intercorrelations of responses to single questions as the experimental
variables. Each question was designed to elicit symptomatic indication of
some particular behavioral aspect of the area of personality under investiga-
tion. The resulting conception of a multidimensional description of intro-
version-extraversion seemed to be well borne out, as well as the identification
of some other dimensions of personality not so pertinent to that concept.
From my associations with G. L. Freeman at Northwestern University,
in which we had discussions of individual differences in traits related to
physiological variables, there grew an experimental inventory emphasizing
psychodynamic aspects of behavior. Items from this inventory were factor
analyzed, yielding a factor of "general drive" and also a factor of "nervous-
ness." The former may be the same factor that Raymond B. Cattell has more
recently identified as the Hid" factor; the latter is probably in much the same
direction as the variable called "manifest anxiety."
Later, items from the paranoid scale of the Humm-Wadsworth Tempera-
ment Analysis were factor analyzed, with the help of Donald W. Dysinger,
to test some hypotheses of Roswell H. Johnson, a marriage counselor, to the
effect that three dimensions are involved. The results bore out the hypoth-
eses but have not been published. The Guilford-Martin Personnel Inventory
grew out of the findings.
Other such analyses have followed, but the later ones have used com-
binations of items to provide experimental variables for factor analyses rather
than single items. Analyses have been done of both temperament (with W. S.
Zimmerman, 1956) and motivational (with P. R. Christensen, N. A. Bond,
& ]\;1. A. Sutton. 1954) variables, including interests in various kinds of
thinking (with P. R. Christensen, J. W. Frick, & P. R. Merrifield, 1961a)
yielding a number of what I have called "hermetic" factors (1959a).
In 1927 there appeared the classical article by L. L. Thurstone on
psychophysical theory, in which he laid the rational basis for quantifying
data obtained from comparative judgments. This opened up a considerable
range of possibilities in psychological measurement. One of my reactions
was to do a number of studies exploiting the methods of scaling from pair-
comparison data. Another was in the form of attention to psychophysical
laws. Noting, as R. S. Woodworth had done, that most empirical data in-
volving measured observed increments in stimulus in relation to stimulus
quantities came out with mathematical relationships somewhere between
Weber's simple proportionality and James McKeen Cattell's square root func-
tion, I proposed to gain flexibility and generality by applying the power
function 6S = KSn, which was first mentioned in 1932.
In the second edition of Psychometric Methods (1954), I ventured to
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 183

integrate this function, in the Fechnerian manner, coming out with the
function R = ]S(1-n) + B, in other words, a power law relating the quantity
of a psychological event to its instigating stimulus event. Unfortunately, I
failed to specify the restriction under which the integration would be justi-
fied. One way of stating this restriction would be in terms of Thurstone's
case V (equal discriminal dispersions and equal intercorrelations of devia-
tions). In a 1954 study with Harvey F. Dingman, I proposed that scaled
psychological values obtained from ratio judgments are proportional to stim-
ulus values raised to a power that could vary according to the experimental
conditions. Such a function was shown to fit data published by R. S. Harper
and S. S. Stevens (I948) as well as our own. Later, Stevens and others have
shown very extensive generality for the applicability of the power law.
Another line of quantitative research, which had no particular ante-
cedent other than my general aesthetic interest and my urge to quantify,
was on color preferences. I felt that the work that had been done on this
subject was very deficient in many ways, but chiefly because no investigator
had taken the trouble to specify the colors he used, either in terms of stimulus
properties or observed visual properties. Two of my major investigations
were aimed at determining functional relationships between the affective
value (degree of liking or disliking) of a color and its perceived properties-
hue, brightness, and chroma. Very systematic relationships were found, with
periodic functional relationships of affective value to hue and with generally
monotonic relations between affective value and either brightness or chroma
(I934, 1940b, 1949). Isohedon charts indicating all such relationships were
published with Patricia C. Smith (1959). Two minor studies dealt with the
prediction of affective value of pairs of colors from information of color prop-
erties (I931) and of affective values of the two color members (with E. C.
Allen, 1936). A study of the latter type was also done with odors and odor
combinations (with W. Spence, 1933). A theoretical outcome was the pro-
posal of an aspect of psychology to be known as "psychodynamics" (l939b),
i.e. having to do with quantitative relationships among observed psychological
variables, in my presidential address to the Psychometric Society.
During the 1930's, a few of my students did minor studies with me on
conditions of attention and measurement of attention (with R. B. Hackman,
1936; with E. Ewart, 1940). I have often regretted the disappearance of
work on attention problems in general, but it is heartening to see that such
investigations are coming back under the more manageable rubrics of vigi-
lance, activation level, and filtering.
My experiences during World War II turned my attention again in the
direction of abilities, although it cannot be said that those interests were
ever dead or even dormant, for the topic of my presidential address to the
Midwestern Psychological Association was "Human Abilities" (1940a). In
March, 1942, I became director of Psychological Research Unit #3 at the
Santa Ana Army Air Base, with the rank of major. The area of research
184 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

assigned to this unit, which was one of several under the general direction
of John C. Flanagan, was that of intellectual abilities, information, and
judgment. Early in 1941, Walter V. Bingham had tried to interest me in
coming into the Adjutant General Office, with the prospect of heading the
psychological test program. But the country was not then at war, and I had
barely settled for what I hoped would be a long residence in a home in Cali-
fornia, so I declined. Flanagan's call came after Pearl Harbor, and there was
no question about what I should do.
The general objective of PRU #3 was the development of tests for
the selection and classification of aircrew trainees-aircraft pilots, navigators,
bombardiers, and eventually Hight engineers and Hexible gunners, as well as
a distinction between fighter and bomber pilots. Fortunately, assigned to my
staff were Merrill Roff and Lloyd G. Humphreys, both of whom were partial
to a factor-analytic approach to test problems and both with some experience
with factor analysis. This was the first time that factor analysis had been put
to use in a vast test-development program.
Several systematic studies were made in the domains of memory, reason-
ing, judgment, foresight and planning, and mechanical abilities. The feasi-
bility and fruitfulness of a rational approach of this type were amply demon-
strated (1948a). The ramifications of some of our studies also extended into
the areas of perceptual and psychomotor tests and their factors. The findings
were published in a 900-page document entitled Printed Classification Tests,
which I edited with John I. Lacey (1947). ReBections on the Air Force ex-
periences served as the content of my presidential address to the Western
Psychological Association in 1947 (1948b).
Later during the war, I was assigned as chief of the Field Research
Unit (Headquarters, Air Force Training Command, in Fort Worth, Texas),
with Paul Horst, Robert L. Thorndike, and Launor F. Carter among the
members of the unit. In the neighboring office were Laurance F. Shaffer,
Edwin E. Ghiselli, and B. von Haller Gilmer, who were supervising the Air
Force's testing operations. Frank A. Geldard was the chief psychologist of the
headquarters group.
After a brief transfer back to PRU #3 at my own request, at the dis-
continuation of that unit in the fall of 1944, I was transferred to PRU #2
at the Aviation Cadet Center, San Antonio (now Lackland Air Force Base),
at which all test-development research was consolidated. The unit later be-
came the Department of Records and Analysis under the AAF School of
Aviation Medicine of Randolph Field. I was separated from military service
in January 1946, with the rank of colonel and with the award of the Legion
of Merit following shortly. I had returned to teaching during the previous
November.
Many unsolved problems left at the conclusion of the wartime research
program, particularly problems in the intellectual area, have since kept my
attention. Research contracts provided by the Personnel and Training Branch
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 185

of the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Office of Education of the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and grants from the Na-
tional Science Foundation since 1949 have made possible a continuous and
integrated program of research in space provided by the Department of
Psychology at the University of Southern California. A number of highly
qualified and dedicated graduate students have also made their lasting con-
tributions to the series of studies in the Aptitudes Research Project. Concen-
trated efforts were directed at domains initially recognized as reasoning,
creative thinking, planning, and evaluation. The findings have been pub-
lished in a series known as Reports from the Psychological Laboratory.
The subject of creative abilities had intrigued me since graduate-student
days, when I realized that intelligence tests had little in them that would
be likely to assess creative talent. On the other hand, I had noted that C. 1\1.
Whipple's book, Manual of l\1ental and Physical Tests (1915), had a chap-
ter on tests of creative imagination, which suggested some possibilities along
that line. After holding some seminars on the subject of creative disposition
in the late 1940's, I selected the topic '<Creativity" for my presidential ad-
dress to the American Psychological Association in 1950. In this address I
set forth hypotheses concerning some of the basic traits that should be
expected to be important for recognized creative people and that should be
represented in tests that call for creative performance. I was most agreeably
surprised at the response to this effort and realized that I had for another
time experienced the luck of good timing. For it appeared, as subsequent
events have shown, that, as E. C. Boring would say, creativity was coming
to the fore in our Zeitgeist. Since 1950 the quantity of literature on crea-
tivity has virtually exploded. Conferences and institutes have been held and
continue to grow in number and in attendance. At least one department of
creative education has been established, at the State University of New York
at Buffalo, and a foundation for creative education has corne into existence.
It cannot be foreseen at this time where all this will lead. The recent frantic
efforts to improve education have clearly been influenced by the "creativity
movement."
But research in the Aptitudes Research Project has by no means been
confined to creative potential. Significant outcomes will be discussed in the
next section under theory. But it can be said that, beginning with the situa-
tion as of 1946, when about twenty-five intellectual abilities had been dem-
onstrated by factor analysis, twenty years later about eighty such dimensions
of ability have been demonstrated.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

I recall Titchener saying more than once that as psychologists grow

older, they tend to go in one of two directions; they go either in the direc-
186 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tion of applied psychology or in the direction of general theory construction.

I have never had ambitions to attempt to build a system of psychology, per-
haps because I noted from my Cornell experience how restricting it can be.
I had my "£ling" at psychotechnology, as Titchener would call it, during
wartime years. But recent developments have directed steps towards basic
psychological theory.
A precipitating experience was an invitation to attend a symposium on
factor analysis conducted by the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scienti-
fique held in Paris in July of 1955. In preparing for this event I wrote a
paper entitled "Les Dimensions de 1'lntellect" (1956), in which I attempted
to put some degree of logical order into the nearly forty intellectual-ability
factors then recognized. I had already noted quite a number of parallels
among the factors and the fact that three distinct kinds of information seemed
to be involved in different classes of tests for the factors.
The distinction between verbal and nonverbal, or verbal versus per-
formance, or verbal and quantitative, which had become somewhat orthodox,
was not sufficient. A further distinction had to be recognized between two
classes of abilities for dealing with nonverbal information, for some factors
are features of tests composed of visual figures (tests of spatial orientation,
visualization, figure analogies, and so on), while others are features of tests
composed of numbers or letters. The former group of tests (and their factors)
were therefore labeled as "figural" and the latter as "structural" or "symbolic."
The verbal category of tests and their factors was later given the label of
"semantic" rather than "verbal," in recognition of the fact that tests of sym-
bolic abilities are also composed of words (hence could be called "verbal"),
yet only the spelling characteristics are of significance in assessing individual
differences, not the meanings attached to those words (symbols).
In the same paper, distinctions were recognized between factors of
memory abilities, "discovery" abilities (later to be labeled as cognition abil-
ities), two kinds of abilities pertaining to production of information (both
heavily dependent upon memory storage), and evaluation abilities (pertain-
ing to decisions about goodness of information). The two-way distinction
between divergent-production abilities and convergent-production abilities
was on the basis of the operational difference that divergent-production tests
require multiple answers to given information, whereas convergent-produc-
tion tests call for single, determined, or restricted answers. Distinctions among
categories later recognized as products of information were then in a very
crude state, but there were a few such distinctions.
Further extensions and clarifications of the theory were published in
1956 and 1957. It was not until there was an invitation to make a presenta-
tion at the Seventh Annual Western Regional Conference on Testing Prob-
lems, conducted by the Educational Testing Service, that the structure-of-
intellect model was fully conceived in its present form. The model was the
basis for my Walter Van Dyke Bingham lecture at Stanford University a
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 187

year later ( 1959b). Besides combining the three ways of classification into
a single system in the form of a three-dimensional matrix, an entire category
of abilities was hypothesized and added for abilities that should take into
account what some had called "social intelligence" and others had called
"social cognition" or "empathy." The type of information involved was labeled
"behavioral." It might have been called "psychological" information, as Spear-
man had forecast in his The Abilities of Man (1927). The label of "social"
was rejected in order to avoid unwanted, broader connotations.
The structure-of-intellect model became the heuristic source of hypoth-
eses of still undiscovered intellectual abilities. Consequent to its service in
that respect, we were led to find about twenty additional factors, and as of
1966 the search proceeds along the same lines. The model is undoubtedly
incomplete, for already four abilities having to do with auditory information
have been reported. The model can be readily extended. It can be noted
that I have also used the matrix type of model in logical classification of
factors found in the areas of psychomotor abilities, temperament traits, and
dimensions of psychopathology (1959a).
Incidentally, I have been somewhat amused by some general reactions
of dismay regarding the large number of factors and some attempts to whisk
them away. In general, I feel sure that psychologists have overdone the
application of the principle of parsimony. In fact, there is all too apparent
the perennial wish to find that a single principle will answer all questions.
Let us be reminded that Frank Barron (1953) and others find that the more
creative individuals prefer complexity to simplicity. Facetiously, I sometimes
wonder, are psychologists an uncreative lot?
But I am sure that the greatest significance of the structure-of-intellect
theory is not to be found in the numbers of abilities that it envisages. I
have pointed out in a number of places (1960, 1961, 1962, 1964) that factor
analysis, properly applied in an experimental-psychology setting, is a power-
ful method for enabling an investigator to turn up concepts that have general
psychological meaningfulness. Concepts in connection with the structure
of intellect can be readily utilized in connection with the understanding of
thinking, problem solving, and creative thinking, as well as learning and
even motivation ( 1965). The concepts readily lend themselves to empirical
research because they are themselves empirically based in terms of kinds of
tasks that can be manipulated experimentally. It is, indeed, through experi-
mental manipulation and systematic variation of tasks that we have been able
to differentiate the abilities or functions of human behavior.

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS

Most of my books have been written for students, with the objective
of making available to them things that I thought they needed and things
188 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

that I wanted to say to them. I have never to my knowledge written with

the objective of impressing my fellow psychologists but rather with the
objective of being understood. I have not attempted to cater to popular views
or movements but to say things that I wanted to say. A consequence has
been that most of my books have not been widely popular, in this country
at least; there have been gratifying uses, with and without translation, in
other countries.
Psychometric Methods was written to fill a need for an expanding
course that I gave in the early 1930's. Starting that course with psycho-
physics and basic statistics, time added scaling methods, test theory and
methods, and factor analysis. My converging of interests brought about some
attempt to give in this book a unified treatment of methods of measurement
in psychology. The response at the first appearance of this book took me
by surprise. But the time was ripe for it. There was a strong undercurrent
of interest in psychological measurement, as indicated by the founding of
the Psychometric Society and the launching of the journal P sychometrika
at about the same time. Substantial developments in the held after 1936
called for the second edition in 1954. Earlier, the publisher had persuaded
me to write a short introduction to statistical methods, which came off the
presses in 1942 as Fundamental Statistics in Psychology and Education. The
fourth edition of the latter appeared in 1965.
My book Personality was a natural outgrowth of my teaching experi-
ences and the growing knowledge of aptitudes and other personality traits
as revealed by factor analysis. At the University of Southern California I
was asked to teach a course on personality. I found that textbooks then avail-
able were likely to be emasculated versions of general psychology under
new titles; a more distinctive type of presentation was desired. My only sab-
batical leave, during the spring of 1956, made possible the achieving of this
writing objective. In the book I tried to give to the subject of personality a
rigorous theory and treatment, as an experimentalist of quantitative bent
viewed it. From the sales reports, it must have been too rigorous for Ameri-
can consumption. The German translation is said to be popular, and the
book has been selected for translation into Asian and African languages;
Persian first.
Over the years, I have produced a number of tests and personality in-
ventories for publication, usually in collaboration with students. Being hrmly
convinced of the ultimate value of assessing traits that have been derived
through a combined rational and empirical approach rather than traits de-
rived "by fiat," as Irving Lorge (1935) expressed it; and having developed
devices for measurement along these lines, I felt some urge to share them
with others, to make them available through publication. My first efforts,
the Nebraska Personality Inventory and a revision of the Army Alpha Ex-
amination, were rejected by a well known test publisher and distributor. The
solution was for my wife, who desired to keep a hand in some kind of psycho-
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 189

logical service, to publish and distribute my tests, which she has continued
to do.
My postwar publications have emphasized aptitude tests, including a
battery of seven factor tests known as the Guilford-Zimmerman Aptitude
Survey (with Wayne S. Zimmerman, 1947) and a growing series of factor
tests arising out of the Aptitude Research Project findings, with various
joint authors. Efforts to demonstrate the value of factor tests in improving
predictions of behavior have been limited, but a recent study shows what
may be expected (Guilford, Hoepfner, & Peterson, 1965). The outstanding
success of the U.S. Air Force classification test battery can be cited as a very
substantial testimonial, since that instrument has covered a number of apti-
tude factors and a number of its tests have approached factorial univocality.
My current efforts in research continue along the same direction of
testing hypotheses regarding undiscovered intellectual abilities, hypotheses
generated from the structure-of-intellect model. My efforts in writing have
the objective of putting in book form the significant !indings of the Aptitudes
Research Project during the past seventeen years and also the construction of
a general-theoretical foundation for intelligence testing ( 1967), something
that has heretofore been almost entirely lacking in this country.

REFERENCES 1

Selected Publications by Joy Paul Guilford

(with K. M. Dallenbach) The determination of memory span by the method of

constant stimuli. Amer. J. Psychol., 1925, 35, 621-628.
(with W. F. Hyde) A test for classification of students in chemistry. J. appl.
Psychoi., 1925, 9, 196-202.
"Fluctuations of attention" with weak visual stimuli. Amer. J. Psychol., 1927,
38, 534-583.
An experiment in learning to read facial expressions. J. Abnorm. soc. Psychol.,
1929,24, 191-202.
(with M. Wilke) A new model for the demonstration of facial expressions. Amer.
J. Psychol., 1930, 42, 436-439.
The prediction of affective values. Amer. J. Psychol., 1931, 43, 469-478.
A generalized psychophysical law. Psychol. Rev., 1932. 39, 73-85.
(with W. Spence) The affective values of combinations of odors. Amer. ].
Psychol., 1933, 45, 443-452.
The affective value of colors as a function of hue, tint, and chroma. J. expo
Psychol., 1934, 17, 342-370.
Psychometric methods. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936; 1954.
(with E. C. Allen) Factors determining the affective values of color combinations.
Amer. J. Psychol. 1936, 48, 643-648.

1 For a more extensive bibliography see Michael, Comrey, & Fruchter (1963) and
Lindsley et al. ( 1964).
190 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(with R. B. Hackman) Varieties and levels of clearness correlated with eyemove-

ments. Amer.]. Psychol., 1936, 48, 371-388.
(with R. B. Hackman) A study of the "visual fixation" method of measuring at-
tention value. ]. appl. Psychol., 1936, 20, 44-59.
General psychology. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1939 (a); 1952.
A study in psychodynamics. Ps),chometrika, 1939, 4, 1-23. (b)
Human abilities. Psychol. Rev.) 1940, 47, 367-394. (a)
There is system in color preferences. J. opt. Soc. Amer., 1940, 30, 455-459. (b)
(with E. Ewart) Reaction time during distraction as an indicator of attention
value. Amer. ]. Psychol., 1940, 53, 554-563.
Fundamental statistics in psychology and education. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1942; 1950; 1956; 1965.
(with J. I. Lacey) Printed classification tests. Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology
Research Program Report No.5. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1947.
(with W. S. Zimmerman) The Guilford-Zimmerman aptitude survey. Parts I-VII.
Manual of instructions and interpretations. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sheridan Sup-
ply Co., 1947.
Factor analysis in a test-development program. Psychol. Rev.) 1948, 55, 79-94. (a)
Some lessons from aviation psychology. Amer. Psychologist, 1948, 3, 3-11. (b)
System in color preferences. ]. Soc. motion pic. tv Engr., 1949, 52, 197-210.
Creativity. Amer. Psychologist, 1950, 5, 444-454.
(with P. R. Christensen, N. A. Bond, & 1\1. A. Sutton) A factor analysis study
of human interests. PsychoZ. Monogr., 1954, 68, No.4 (Whole No. 375).
(with H. F. Dingman) A validation study of ratio-judgment methods. Amer. }.
Psychol., 1954, 67, 395-410.
Les dimensions de l'intellect. In H. Laugier (Ed.), L'analyse factorielle et ses
applications. Paris: Centre N ationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956, 321-
335. (a)
The structure of intellect. Psychol. Bull., 1956, 53, 267-293. (b)
(with W. S. Zimmerman) Fourteen dimensions of temperament. Psychol. Monogr.,
1956, 70, No. 10 (Whole No. 417).
Revised structure of intellect. Rep. psychol. Lab., No. 19. Los Angeles: Univ.
Southern Calif., 1957.
New frontiers of testing in the discovery and development of human talent. In
Seventh annual western regional conference on testing problems. Los Angeles:
Educational Testing Service, 1958, 20-32.
Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. (a)
Three faces of intellect. Amer. Psychologist, 1959, 14, 469-479. (b)
(with P. C. Smith) A system of color preferences. Amer. }. Psychol., 1959, 72,
487-502.
Basic conceptual problems in the psychology of thinking. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci.,
1960, 91, 6-21.
Factorial angles to psychology. Psychol. Rev., 1961, 68, 1-20.
(with P. R. Christensen, J. W. Frick, & P. R. Merrifield) Factors of interest in
thinking. t. gen. Psychol., 1961, 65, 39-56. (a)
(with P. R. Merrifield, P. R. Christensen, & J. W. Frick) Interrelationships be-
tween certain abilities and certain traits of motivation and temperament. [. gen.
Psychol., 1961,65, 57-74. (b)
JOY PAUL GUILFORD 191

(with P. R. Merrifield, P. R. Christensen, & J. W. Frick) Some new symbolic

factors of cognition and convergent production. Educ. psychol. Measmt, 1961,
21,515-541. (c)
An informational view of mind. ]. psychol. Res., 1962, 6, 1-10.
Intelligence, creativity, and learning. In R. W. Russell (Ed.), Frontiers in psy-
chology. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1964, 125-147.
(with M. O'Sullivan & R. de Mille) The measurement of social intelligence.
Rep. psychol. Lab., No. 34. Los Angeles: Univ. Southern Calif. Press, 1965.
(with R. Hoepfner & H. Peterson) Predicting achievement in ninth-grade mathe-
matics from measures of intellectual-aptitude factors. Educ. psychol. Measmt,
1965, 25, 659-682.
Motivation in an informational psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska sym-
posium on motivation. Lincoln: Univ. Nebr. Press, 1965.
The nature of human intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Other Publications Cited

Allport, F. H. Social psychology. Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1924.

Barron, F. Complexity-simplicity as a personality dimension. J. abnorm. soc.
Psychol., 1953, 48, 163-172.
Boring, E. G. Edward Bradford Titchener, 1867-1927. Amer. J. Psychol., 1927,
38, 489-506.
Hackman, R. B. A study of the "visual fixation" method of measuring attention
value. ]. appl. Psychol., 1936,20, 44-59.
Harper, R. S. & Stevens. S. S. A psychological scale of weight and a formula for
its derivation. Amer. J. Psychol., 1948, 61, 343-351.
Lindsley, D. B., et al. American psychological association distinguished scientific
contribution awards. Amer. Psychologist, 1964, 19, 941-954.
Lorge, I. Personality traits by fiat. J. educ. Psychol., 1935, 26, 273-278.
McDougall, \V. Outline of abnormal psychology. New York: Scribner, 1926.
Michael, W. B., Cornrey, A. L., & Fruchter, B. ]. P. Guilford: psychologist and
teacher. Psychol. Bull., 1963, 60, 1-34.
Spearman, C. The abilities of man. New York: Macmillan, 1927.
Stevens, S. S. On the psychophysical Iaw. Psychol. Rev., 1957, 54, 153-181.
Thurstone, L. L. Psychophysical analysis. Amer. J. Psychol., 1927, 38, 368-389.
Whipple, G. M. Manual of mental and physical tests. Part II. Complex processes.
Baltimore : Warwick and Yark: 1915.
193
Harry Helson
As one sets himself to the task of writing his autobiography, questions
immediately arise: What should he include? What should he omit? What
will be of interest to his contemporaries, what to posterity, if indeed anyone
is interested in the background details of a life behind the public printed
record? Who knows what will be important or interesting in another day
and age? Can one write of his work, his encounters with others, his disap-
pointments and satisfactions objectively? Is it desirable to be coldly objective
if the purpose of these autobiographies is to make the man known as a
human being, not merely as a reflection of the scientist as he appears in his
published works? These and other questions spring to mind in preparing
to delineate the ideas, events, and people in a life that is largely past. The
objective facts are available elsewhere. What is not so easy to determine and
is known only to the writer-such as, the choice points in his career, the way
his teachers and colleagues have affected him, and his aspirations and goals-
are matters of personal evaluation and its attendant biasses. But it is in such
personal matters that the individual is revealed.
My parents came to this country, following my maternal grandfather,
in the 1880's or early 1890's from Cherkassy in the Ukraine. They were
married after reaching this country, and I was born November 9, 1898, in
Chelsea, Massachusetts. My father abandoned my mother when I was about
four or five years of age, taking my older sister with him. I stayed with my
mother until I was ten years old when, on account of her serious illness, I
was sent to my father who had remarried and settled in Old Town, Maine.
Without normal family relationships until the age of eleven, my child-
hood was not a happy one, to say the least. During the first few months with
my father, I frequently contemplated suicide and even went to the banks
of the Penobscot river to end it all. Fortunately, I came upon a group of
youngsters swimming and cavorting on the bank and sat down to watch
them. Not only was I diverted from my purpose, but it occurred to me that
if there were youngsters my age, perhaps no better off than 1, who could
enjoy life, there was hope for me. I resolved to go back to the "cold" home
where I was wanted by neither my father nor my stepmother and to make
the best of it. At the end of the summer, my father moved from Old Town
195
 196 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

to Bangor, and the whole family was so engrossed in the new business that
I was completely on my own from early morning till late at night. Finally
the fear of entering a dark abode at night and the settling noises of the house
as I lay in bed unable to sleep until the others arrived at a very late hour,
drove me to seek a home elsewhere. Some friends of my mother. whom she
had met some years before, offered to take me in, and I moved my few be-
longings to their house. It was during the following spring. almost a year
after I left my mother in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that I was fortunate
to be taken into the home of Frederick and Theodosia Dyer who thereafter
became my foster parents. They wished to adopt me, but my mother would
not agree; however, they regarded me as their son, and their home was mine
as long as they lived.
1\ly father never made the slightest effort to find out where I had gone
or to contact me after I left his house! I relate these facts because there is
now a widespread tendency to place all the blame for juvenile delinquency
and even later troubles on broken homes and bad early environments. No
doubt these play a part, but if a child is early imbued with a vision of the
good life, subjected to discipline, and given high goals to strive for, the bad
effects of a poor early environment may be counteracted to a great extent. My
mother did these things for me. and lowe it to her that I did not succumb to
the vicissitudes of my early life. In defense of my father, I should point out
that after the death of his second wife when I was in my senior year at
Bowdoin College, we met by chance, and he became interested and friendly.
He helped pay my way through graduate school and made up to a consid-
erable extent for his early neglect.
The Dyers were members of the First Universalist Church in Bangor
but were also ardent spiritualists. They seldom, if ever, attended church serv-
ices; instead they devoted themselves to bringing spiritualist speakers and
mediums to Bangor for public meetings and seances in our home. As a result,
I early became acquainted at firsthand with mediums, spiritualistic philoso-
phy, and the main manifestations of spiritualisrri-Yspirit controls," messages,
telepathy, clairvoyance, and physical manifestations. Several physical phe-
nomena that occurred spontaneously in our own house left an indelible
impression of unexplained events that merit further investigation. They im-
pressed me because I am positive they were not the result of trickery or
mechanical manipulation by any person in the household. I am convinced
of this, not only because of my faith in the integrity of members of the
family, but even more because there was nobody smart enough in the house
to produce them by mechanical or other means. With the reader's indulgence,
I will describe two of these phenomena. The first happened during a dark
seance in which only members of the household were present. We were
seated in a semicircle in the living room with blinds drawn and the room
almost totally dark. Suddenly a small patch of light about the size of a
HARRY HELSON 197

quarter appeared on the rug at the feet of the person on the right end of the
"circle" and proceeded to move slowly and continuously along the rug a few
inches in front of each person. When it came to me, I put my foot on it and
it disappeared. I then got down on my hands and knees and covered the
spot with cupped hands and saw the light under my hands. It was, therefore,
not light reflected or transmitted from a source above the floor. After these
tests, the light moved to the last person in the circle and there disappeared.
During the whole episode, no one moved except myself when I made the
tests. I will not use space here to discuss possible sources of this phenomenon,
such as an afterimage explanation, because none that I have been able to
con jecture then or since seem plausible.
The second phenomenon that has puzzled me for many years occurred
as follows. While standing in broad daylight beside the kitchen stove, a hod
full of coal was violently shaken, although there was no movement of the
floor or anything near it. I fled from the kitchen to the second floor of the
house, where I told Mrs. Dyer and her sister what had happened. They
told me it was only my imagination and to go back to the kitchen to finish
what I was doing, When I returned to the same spot, the hod of coal went
through the same performance! Again I fled, and the ladies came downstairs
and examined the hod and the stove, and we found nothing. These and other
poltergeist phenomena have simply remained in my memory as unexplained
physical events without convincing me that there is personal survival after
death or even «mental" control of physical objects beyond the confines of
one's own body. But they have left me with an open mind toward paranormal
phenomena.
My adventures in psychic research were resumed during my third year
of graduate work when I became assistant to Gardner Murphy who was
Hodgson Psychic Research Fellow at Harvard, while, at the same time, he
was teaching at Columbia. It was during that year that we investigated the
famous "Margery" mediumship. Margery was the wife of a Boston surgeon
who had started in a small way with table tipping and other physicalistic
phenomena in seances held in her home for a few friends. Soon she was in
competition for a prize of $5000 offered by a magazine if she could prove
to the satisfaction of a committee appointed by it that the phenomena were
genuine. William McDougall and Murphy were members of the committee,
and I was invited to several of the seances. From the first, I was unimpressed
by Margery's performances-they were "old stuff" to one who had witnessed
table tipping, table rapping, and movement of objects in the dark at seances
in spiritualistic camp meetings in Maine and New York. When I discovered
the modus operandi of one of her tricks, moving a piano stool from its place
at the piano to a wall six or seven feet away, and presented McDougall with
pieces of the string used to pull the stool by a confederate in the basement,
and this evidence was presented to Dr. and Mrs. Crandon, my attendance
 198 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

at the seances was no longer desired. In a book published some time after-
wards, Dr. Crandon maintained that my evidence had been withdrawn by
McDougall, but this, I understand, was not true.
A year or two later Margery went to Europe, and when she returned,
she had a new set of phenomena, among them the production of so-called
ectoplasm and spirit photography. By that time I had left the Boston area
and knew of her exploits only by hearsay. Suffice it to say, she was not
awarded the $5000 prize, although one member of the committee, not a
scientist, professed to believe her phenomena were genuine.
The spiritualistic background of my early boyhood inclined me toward
an interest in philosophy and psychology, not so much to explicate spiritual-
istic phenomena, as to learn what was known about the universe at large
and man's place in it. However, the "efficient cause" of my turning to these
subjects was my attendance, when I was about fourteen, at the weekly meet-
ings of a small group of adults at which Andrew D. White's History of the
Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) was read aloud
and discussed. One of the members of the group, a lawyer who held the
position of clerk in the municipal court, steered me to the works of the
great religious iconoclast Robert C. Ingersoll, Spencer's First Principles
(1900), and William James' Psychology (1892). At that time, I was over-
whelmed by what seemed to be the depth and extent of these writers' knowl-
edge. I wondered how they were able to learn so much in a single lifetime.
My adulation for them was global and undiscriminating. It was many years
later before I found out how superficial Spencer actually was, what a mar-
velous style Ingersoll had, and how pithy and true was James in his writings.
About the same time, I was loaned Locke's two-volume An Essay Concern-
ing Human Understanding, but most of it was far above my comprehension.
The net result of all this reading and a few glimmerings was a resolve to
devote myself to philosophy and psychology as soon as I entered college.
In contrast with my later concentration on work to the exclusion of
practically all outside interests, in high school I studied violin and played
in both the Young People's Symphony and the high school orchestra, was a
member of the debating team, editor of the monthly journal, The Oracle,
during my senior year, and won the boys' senior essay medal, which all
members of the graduating class were required to compete for. During my
college years, I had less time for outside activities, having to earn money by
playing the violin for dances, church functions, and on other occasions. Ex-
cept for being on the debating team and contributing slightly to a maga-
zine that two of my classmates and I wrote, printed, and distributed, my
attention was wholly taken up with my studies. My concentration on, and
dedication to, a scholarly life really began in college and continued there-
after. As time went on, I spent less and less time on music and, except for
indulgence in a concert, play, or movie, I have had no hobbies or extra-
curricular interests to speak of. Any diversion that required regular participa-
HARRY HELSON 199

tion, such as a weekly bridge club, bored me and was soon dropped. On the
other hand, I count myself a more-than-average social individual, enjoying
the society of others on a free give-and-take basis. I have never cared to be
a member of any type of organization and have joined only scholarly and
scientific organizations. I did join a college fraternity at Bowdoin but never
experienced the benefits supposed to inhere in such organizations. Most of
my friends were either in other fraternities or were not members of any
fraternity. I learned early that organizational affiliations do not necessarily
connote men of character and worth, and so have refused to identify myself
formally with any particular political, religious, or social groups.
I went to Bowdoin College with the intention of majoring in philosophy
and psychology. In those days there were no counselors, no professors to
advise with regard to choice of courses, major subject, or distribution. One
read the catalogue stating the requirements for the B.S. or B.A. degree and
decided for himself what he would take. I do not remember having a con-
sultation with a professor during my whole undergraduate career, either to
get advice on preparation for a career or about work in college. As a result,
I found myself deficient in mathematics and physics after obtaining the Ph.D.
degree. These lacks were partly made up in the years following graduate
work. I took courses in mathematics at Cornell, both during regular session
and summer school, and at the University of Kansas two years later. During
another summer spent at Cornell, I audited courses in general and physical
chemistry and worked in the photometry laboratory. Finally, in the thirties,
when vacuum tube techniques began to be used for almost everything in
the laboratory, I arranged a private course with a young physicist at Bryn
Mawr College, whom I paid out of my own pocket, for lectures and labora-
tory work in electronics. When a group of graduate students in the psy-
chology department at Byrn Mawr asked for a course in neurology, and a
member of the biology department agreed to give it, I took the course with
them, dissecting dogfish and pig embryos among other laboratory assign-
ments. I mention these efforts at self-improvement because I felt I had much
to learn after obtaining the Ph.D. degree. Besides taking courses with formal
instruction, I also had to start from scratch on my own with statistics, as
there was no course or requirement in this area during my graduate days in
the Department of Psychology at Harvard. Now there are grants, career
awards, and other means for deepening and broadening one's knowledge in
the postdoctoral days if one so desires. Much as I gained from all this
work following the doctorate, it would have been much more valuable had
I absorbed it much earlier, preferably during my undergraduate days.
I started graduate work at Harvard with the intention of working toward
a Ph.D. degree in philosophy, but the arrival of E. G. Boring from Clark
University at the beginning of my second year was responsible for my
change to psychology. With Boring, whose courses I audited because I was
ostensibly a philosophy major, a new, fresh wind seemed to blow across the
 200 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

psychological horizon. After the second or third lecture, I remember looking

across the room at Beebe-Center who, when he caught my glance, gave a
solemn nod of approval as if to say, "This is what we have been looking for."
And indeed it was. Problems of sensation and perception were discussed in
the light of all the available experimental, quantitative literature. There was
no armchair psychologizing here. And then like a bombshell came Boring's
presentation of Wertheimer's and Korte's work on apparent movement, in-
troducing us to Gestalt psychology. There was nothing written in English
about Gestaltism except for Koffka's 1922 article in Bulletin, which, because
of the new way of looking at things, presented more difficulties than enlight-
enment concerning the Gestalt movement. Now this article seems to me a
model exposition of the Gestalt way of looking at psychological problems.
So, at the beginning of my third year at Harvard, when it was necessary
to decide on a thesis subject, I could not find a philosophical problem that
interested me. I had made an appointment one weekend to confer with Ralph
Barton Perry on the following Monday to decide on a philosophical subject
for a thesis, but over the weekend it suddenly occurred to me, "Why not do
an exposition and criticism of the Gestalt psychology?" I was so fired over
this possibility, I forgot to cancel my appointment with Perry and, instead,
presented the project to Boring.
The idea of a nonexperimental thesis in psychology was alien to Boring
and took him somewhat by surprise, but he promised to consult with other
members of the department, which then included philosophy and social
ethics as well as psychology. In a few days, I received a positive reply and
Boring's consent to act as my adviser. (I do not remember that we had formal
committees on theses or candidates in those days, but, in addition to Boring,
I find acknowledgments to McDougall and Langfeld in my thesis, so these
three must have served as my committee.) Then began the most intensive
reading and studying I have ever done. Over ninety percent of the 240
references were German, most of them long, difficult, experimental articles,
some of them written in the ponderous German style of the Austrians in
Graz and Vienna. In the thesis, the concept of Gestalt was traced back to
the Greek and modern philosophers and the work of Meinong, von Ehrenfels,
Schumann, Benussi, Buhler, Gelb, Rubin, and others. The thesis ran to 484
typed pages and was published as four articles in the American Journal of
Psychology in 1925 and 1926. These were later reproduced in a bound vol-
ume with preface, bibliography, and indexes at the suggestion and with the
help of K. M. Dallenbach. The first of the four articles was submitted to
Titchener in his last year as editor of the American Journal of Psychology.
However, the article actually submitted to Titchener was not published for,
as he told me, "If this is published you will gain a reputation for scholarship,
but nobody will read you." In a few minutes Titchener delineated the kind
of exposition that would be of interest, and his judgment proved to be cor-
rect as shown by the fact that all the bound volumes were quickly bought,
HARRY HELSON 201

and, even after 200 more were procured, I was unable to £11 many requests,
including one for sixty copies for Koffka's class in Berkeley where he taught
one summer.
Before leaving the Harvard period, I would like to say a few words
about McDougall. I audited one or two of McDougall's courses, and, as
assistant to Murphy who was Hodgson Fellow in psychic research, I also
reported to McDougall on the work we were doing in that area and thus
came to know him as a person as well as professor. McDougall was undoubt-
edly one of the most kindly, finest gentlemen I have ever met in the teaching
profession. After each of his lectures, there would always be a long line of
students outside his office desiring to confer with him. I am sure these con-
ferences were not merely concerned with problems of classwork. Since my
purpose in seeing him was to talk about our last seance with Margery or
about some medium I had investigated or about the phenomena at our last
table-tipping session in the laboratory, I usually stood last in line in order
to allow him as much time as he wished to give our conference without
forcing others to wait. In these conferences, McDougall would puff at his
pipe, blowing huge smoke rings that Hoated a foot or so away from his face
and then returned to encircle his face like a vertical halo. These smoke rings
never lost their fascination for me. During one of our conferences, McDougall
announced that one of his grandfathers was Jewish-a fact that few, if any,
in this country know. I mention it here for what it is worth as counterevi-
dence for the charge that McDougall was a racist or held objectionable
racist theories. He had lost a brother in the First World War and, thereafter,
he told me, could never bring himself to read the German literature again.
The idea of a Herrenvolk was, I am sure, as obnoxious to McDougall as to
almost everyone else both then and later.
At the time I obtained my degree in June, 1924, there were no jobs
available in psychology, at least for me. Owing to my association with
l\1cDougall and Gardner Murphy on the Margery case, I was offered the
chance to be Walter Prince's assistant in the Boston branch of the American
Society for Psychic Research, with the prospect of succeeding him as research
officer and editor of their journal on his retirement. But the idea of spending
a lifetime on psychic research with little likelihood of any positive contribu-
tions to knowledge did not appeal to me, much as I needed a job and attrac-
tive as was the salary offered. Fortunately for me, Boring wrote Titchener
asking if he could £nd a place for me at Cornell as instructor, and Titchener
replied he would see what he could do. I went home to Maine to await
definite word, which did not come until late August or early September-
an instructorship at $1200. Compared with present-day beginning salaries,
this amount was pitifully small, but I was single, wanted a university posi-
tion in psychology, and a place to work and learn. Cornell was ideal and I
accepted gratefully.
My first meeting with Titchener was somewhat of a disappointment.
 202 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

He was supervising the cutting down of a tree in his yard and had on an
old pair of baggy trousers, a sweater, and shirt open at the neck. In those
days people did little yardwork and almost no "do-it-yourself" chores. I made
one or two comments, hoping to start him talking about psychology, but
his interest was in the way the limbs were coming off the tree. I do remem-
ber that he spoke of "the delight in the use of tools" and remarked that "a
gentleman never mentioned money matters." Yet, before the afternoon was
over, he spoke of how nice it would be if some rich man would offer him his
yacht for an extended cruise!
My teaching assignment first semester at Cornell came as a surprise.
Titchener informed me I was to demonstrate to the graduate students the
main pieces of apparatus in the Cornell laboratory, giving their history as
well as their modus operandi. "But," I remonstrated, "I don't know anything
about apparatus. My dissertation was all library work." "I know," replied
Titchener, "that's why I've given you this course. In this way you'll learn."
And so I did. Deane B. Judd, with whom I had become acquainted, was a
graduate student in physics, and I enlisted his aid. Judd lectured on light-
measuring instruments, and I parceled out a report or two to students on
other types of equipment. I was also asked to check the inventory of labora-
tory equipment at Cornell, a task Bentley assigned me the following year at
the University of Illinois, and from these assignments I became acquainted
with laboratory equipment and its uses.
The year 1924-25 at Cornell was notable both for what I learned and
the friends made there. In addition to Judd, J. P. Guilford was also a grad-
uate student. Dallenbach was on the faculty and was the most active re-
searcher in the department. My friendship with these men has continued
ever since, buttressed by professional as well as personal affinities. Due to an
accidental incision in the left ventral surface of the first phalange of Dallen-
bach's index finger, it was rendered completely devoid of sensation. Dal-
len bach gave me the opportunity to be the experimenter to trace the return
of sensitivity in a replication of the work of Henry Head and E. G. Boring
who deliberately severed nerves in their arms for the purpose of studying this
problem. Not knowing how fast various types of sensation might return,
we worked every day for several weeks, then once a week, later once a month,
and gradually extended the periods between observations to a year or more.
Data have accumulated over forty years, but no publication has resulted
except for brief reports by Dallenbach or myself at psychological meetings.
Such a huge mass of data has accumulated, it is now doubtful that it will
ever see the light of day in print.
To me, the most interesting finding in this study is that sensitivity re-
turns simultaneously on all sides of the numb area, a result that is not com-
patible with the notion of regeneration restricted to the nerves originally
severed. It looks as if normal nerve endings on all sides of the affected area,
as well as the cut nerves, send branches into the numb region; else why
HARRY HELSON 203

does sensitivity spread from normal tissue on all sides surrounding the anes-
thetic area?
The work with Dallenbach gave me excellent training in apparatus
and methods for investigating skin and underlying sensitivity. It was as
good as writing a Ph.D. dissertation in experimental psychology under Dal-
lenbach's direction. I can thus claim two "masters": Boring at Harvard and
Dallenbach at Cornell. In addition, that year Judd and I constructed perhaps
the first Ganzfeld: a sphere lined on the inside with orange-red Hering
paper provided equal and constant chromatic stimulation to all parts of the
retina, while the eyes were allowed to move freely. My interest in problems
of adaptation thus began at the very start of my career and has continued
ever since.
Having studied the Gestalt literature for my thesis, I was fired with
enthusiasm for this approach, even though I was not able to agree with their
position 100 percent. Compared with the only alternative approach (i.e.,
analytical introspection) that was available in the mid-twenties for the study
of sensory processes, Gestalttheorie was far preferable. At Cornell my com-
mand of Gestalttheorie was largely wasted. There was no chance of offering
a course in it or of bringing it explicitly into my teaching because my main
job as instructor was handling discussion sections in the introductory course
where a Titchenerian point of view prevailed. In those days young instructors
with Ph.D.s did largely what graduate assistants now are called upon to do.
I did enliven my sections with accounts of Gestalt experiments in perception
and Kohler's work with the apes, but there were no questions in the exami-
nations on this material. When Bentley invited me to join his department at
the University of Illinois at a considerably higher salary than I was getting
at Cornell, I accepted.
During the 1924-25 academic year, Koala came to Cornell as visiting
professor, but not under the auspices of the psychology department. Ogden,
dean of arts and sciences and also head of the education department, was
responsible for Koffka's appointment, and so he was technically a member of
the education department rather than the psychology department. Koffka
gave a small seminar attended by Ogden, Dallenbach, Guilford, myself, and
two or three others. He also gave the Schiff lectures for the University at
large. As stated in the preface to my collected papers on Gestalt, I was in-
debted to Koffka's seminar and the Schiff lectures for much in several sec-
tions of the third article. In addition, Guilford and I were invited to Koffka's
home to read German one evening a week, and these informal meetings were
most delightful and informative. Koffka told us about the positions of the
three young men, Wertheimer, Kohler, and himself, in relation to their
older teachers and stalwarts, Stumpf and Schumann, and we learned how
deep and radical was the break between Gestalttheorie and prevailing ap-
proaches to perception. When I once referred to the Graz group, among
whom Meinong and Benussi were the leaders, as the left or radical wing of
 204 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

the Gestalt revolution, with their emphasis on Produktionsvorgang to pro-

duce Gestalten, Koffka retorted, "No-we are the radical group, they are the
conservatives." On second thought, it was plain to me that Koffka was quite
right, for the resort to higher psychological processes to account for percep-
tion of configurations was in the tradition of dualistic accounts of perception;
i.e., one type of process for sensory data and another type for perception of
patterns or wholes. Postulation of a single, unitary psychophysiological basis
for all perceptions, temporal as well as spatial, was indeed a radical break
with the' past in 1912, the year that Wertheimer published the paper that
launched Gestalt psychology on its way.
The seminar given by Koffka was during the first semester and the one
given by Titchener was second semester. Since attendance at Titchener's
seminar was wholly by invitation, and since only the staff and a few of the
best graduate students were invited, we were all agog as to whether or not
Koffka would be invited and, if so, whether there would be any fireworks in
view of the widely disparate views held by the two men regarding funda-
mentals in psychology. Titchener had easily disposed of Gestalttheorie in
personal discussions with some of us by claiming that it did not represent
the scientific approach to psychology-dealing as it did with complexes, forms,
and meanings, it was an applied psychology and hence really did not con-
cern his position at all. Koffka and Ogden were both invited to participate
in Titchener's seminar and never was there anything approaching a con-
frontation of their opposing views. The subject of the seminar would be,
Titchener announced, the meanings of "attention" in the literature. The
various journals were parceled out to the members of the seminar, who were
required to report on all the ways in which this term was used. Dallenbach
and I were assigned the Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie, which at that time com-
prised about eighty-five volumes! Each of us read about half this number,
although I must say after careful reading of five or six volumes, I began
skimming, stopping to read only where such words as Aufmerksamkeit, Klar-
heit, Deutlichkeit, and other words having some relation to attention ap-
peared. Koffka, so far as I can remember, did not report and was not even
asked to present the Gestalt criticisms of the concept of attention and all
that they entailed; nor did he get a chance to discuss the positive contribu-
tions of Gestalttheorie to the problem of attention.
At Illinois I began under extremely trying circumstances. Early in the
fall, I developed an infection in my left thigh that required hospitalization.
I was the first patient in the new University student infirmary. When the
infection had proceeded to the point where I could not move my entire leg,
my condition was very grave, as evidenced by the fact that a screen was placed
around my bed presumably to hide a dying patient. My doctor operated,
making two deep incisions. The infection had literally dug a channel deep
in the tissue about four inches long. The operation, allowing drainage and
HARRY HELSON 205

medication, saved my life, for there were no antibiotics or sulfa drugs at that
time.
I recovered quite rapidly from this illness and resumed my teaching
and research. Again most of my work was teaching sections of introductory
psychology with Bentley giving the lectures. Again, as pointed out above, I
had to make an inventory of the apparatus in the laboratory, finding many of
the old standard pieces at Illinois that I had encountered at Cornell. Among
the oddities were the plaster brain models that were said to belong to Spurz-
heim, the phrenologist, that had somehow found their way to the Illinois
Depai tment of Psychology. Besides preparing the third and fourth articles
in my series on Gestalt for the American Journal of Psychology, the only
research I was able to do did not pan out, but there was one result that was
further investigated thirty-five years later. A graduate student, Joseph Steger,
at Kansas State University, learning of it in my seminar, asked to study it
out of pure curiosity. I had tried to condition a sensory process, first by pair-
ing light with tone or tone with light and then omitting the second stimulus.
The cases where subjects reported a conditioned tone following light or a
conditioned light following tone were too few to warrant publication. To
conceal the purpose of the experiment, subjects were required to press a key
on the appearance of the forst stimulus, as if it were a reaction time study.
I found that the reaction times to the forst stimulus were longer when the
second stimulus followed the first than when the second stimulus was
omitted. This finding was later amply confirmed with two light stimuli
(Helson and Steger, 1962). A number of subsequent studies, in which
heteromodal stimuli were employed, have shown that there is facilitation
(quickening) of response up to about 25 milliseconds after which there is
increasing inhibition up to 100 milliseconds with the effect of the second
stimulus on the first diminishing thereafter (Helson, 1964).
Although I was set to remain at Illinois, I received an invitation from
R. H. Wheeler to join him at the University of Kansas as assistant professor
at a considerable raise in salary. Having started at Cornell as instructor at
$1200 and having gone to Illinois at $2000, the offer of $2600 seemed
munificent, especially since I planned to be married and money became im-
portant. I had become engaged to Lida Anderson, a graduate student in
French at Illinois, and we planned to work for a year, she to teach at Alma
College in Michigan, while I went to Kansas, in order to save enough to
get married on. I returned to Cornell in the summer of 1926 to resume work
on Dallenbach's finger and left for Kansas late in August. I met my fiancee
in Chicago to drive to Urbana where we planned to visit her sister and
brother-in-law, Ahna and David Fiske. We decided then and there to give
up the idea of being apart for a year and were married in Chicago. Needless
to say, both the Fiskes in Urbana and, a few days later, the Wheelers in
Lawrence were quite surprised when a married couple appeared. The
 206 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Wheelers helped us hnd a house, kept us until we could buy some furniture,
and otherwise aided in making life comfortable and pleasant during those
beginning days.
Kansas was a busy hive of research activity. W. S. Hunter had preceded
Wheeler as chairman, so there was a good animal laboratory and even a
Diener who took care of the animals. With such good animal facilities, I
naturally did a rat study, in which the problem was to determine if rats
would transpose a brightness discrimination relatively, as Kohler's apes had
done. The rats behaved in accordance with expectations from Gestalttheorie,
and I published my one and only animal study. This study, I think, was
the Iirst to invoke lithe law of least action" as an explanation in the field of
learning and performance (1927). It was also at Kansas that I did experi-
mental work on vision in the blind spot and the study with Guilford showing
that perception of phi phenomenon and eye movements did not correlate.
Other studies I completed at Kansas were a study of the tau effect with S. M.
King, which resulted in two publications, and a description of the Kansas
kinohapt with S. H. Bartley. These studies did not appear in print until
after I had left Kansas. I cite them to bear cut what I stated in the opening
sentence, that is, that Kansas was a beehive of experimental activity during
these two years and later, as there were also many studies in progress by
other members of the department. I should mention that the work on the
phi phenomenon was done with an eye-movement camera that Guilford
and I "built." We also constructed the kinohapt with which the tau effect
was studied. Then, and until the advent of electronic equipment from com-
mercial sources, research apparatus was usually built or at least assembled
by each worker or with the aid of an instrument-maker. There was little
money in those days to purchase more than essential parts of apparatus.
During my first year at Kansas, Wheeler strongly opposed my espousal
of Gestalttheorie. He was then an ardent introspectionist, believing in "com-
plete" analytical introspection that went far beyond Titchenerian-type pro-
tocols. Wheeler also advocated a motor theory of consciousness, maintaining,
as Dewey and Munsterberg had before him, that the motor side of the
reflex arc must be completed before there was any consciousness. By the
middle of my second and last year at Kansas, Wheeler had completely em-
braced Gestalttheorie and one day outlined to me a series of books he planned
to write within a relatively short time utilizing holistic and allied concepts.
It seemed like an impossible task in the time limit he had set himself, but,
as the sequel showed, he accomplished it as planned. Into all his activities-
intellectual, personal, social-Wheeler put all of his energies. When he
turned to his studies of the effects of climate on human behavior, he took
an even more radical position than Buckle or Huntington: climatic cycles
were responsible for all human activities, including types of government,
movements in literature, mathematics, and even the sciences. According to
this theory, warm cycles breed individualism, romanticism, atomism, and
HARRY HELSON 207

democracy; cold cycles breed monarchy, dictatorship, classicism, and holism.

There never was a more ardent department head or friend than Wheeler;
he worked hard to make members of his department happy and furthered
their work in every way; no one could have been more appreciative of those
under him. It was with genuine regret that I left Kansas.
The reasons for my early frequent moves, from Cornell to Illinois to
Kansas to Bryn Mawr, where at last I settled for twenty years, were not
wholly as clear to me then as they appear to be in retrospect. U ntil the
Second World War, university faculties were not as dynamic and changing
as they are now. Departments were relatively small and static. Promotions
were slow and waited on the death or retirement of senior professors. At
Cornell, Illinois, and Kansas, I saw myself waiting in line, as it were, for
a better salary and promotion. There was no certain prospect, even with
good work, of reasonably rapid advancement. When the invitation came to
go to Bryn Mawr as director of the laboratory and associate professor, with
promotion to full professor assured when the incumbent Professer (James
Leuba) retired in five years, the open path I desired materialized. In urging
me to remain at Kansas, both Wheeler and Chancellor Lindley held out the
prospect of succeeding to professorship and chairmanship of the department
when Wheeler left. Neither Lindley nor Wheeler dreamed that it would be
nearly twenty years before the latter would leave Kansas. In addition, Bryn
Mawr appealed to me because there I could build a laboratory and, to a
lesser extent, a new department, as contrasted with the set patterns I had
found at Cornell, Illinois, and Kansas. Cornell was strongly Titchenerian in
fact and in spirit; Illinois was amorphous both in and outside the depart-
ment, and I had felt lost; Kansas was dominated by Wheeler, and, much as
I liked and admired him, I wanted to have my own show. So to Bryn Mawr
I went in September of 1928.
I came to Bryn Mawr College a year after the Ferrees had left for
Wilmer Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. Most of their apparatus
was still in the psychology laboratory at Bryn Mawr, and they asked to pur-
chase as much of it as I was willing to part with. Since it was apparatus
that had been developed for their own special purposes, I was glad to sell
most of it for about $20,000 which furnished me with a nest egg for equip-
ping an experimental laboratory such as I desired for teaching and research
purposes. When I went to Bryn Mawr, there was little or no equipment in
the laboratory for general experimental psychology. The appropriation for
all needs in psychology was $500 a year and stood at that figure from 1928
until I left in 1949, partly because I never completely spent all the money
received for the Ferree apparatus. (I have always hoarded money received for
teaching and research, whether from an institution, a military agency, or
private foundation. As of this writing, I have not yet spent all of a grant of
about $9000 received about ten years ago, although several publications have
appeared as a result of this grant.) At Bryn Mawr, I had the benefit of an
 208 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

excellent instrument-maker, Mr. Norman Powell, whom I shared with the

departments of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology! However, most of
his time went to psychology, for we spent many hours a week designing,
testing, and modifying various pieces of equipment.
These days almost everything in the psychology laboratory is electrical
or electronic in nature and bought on the open market at fantastic figures
compared with what we expended. The present stands in sharp contrast to
my early days when apparatus was either built with one's own hands or in
close contact with the college or department instrument-maker. Not pos-
sessing the necessary skills myself to work with lathe, drill press, planer,
and other equipment, I had to communicate my ideas to the instrument-
maker by means of rough sketches with the dimensions of what I had in
mind. Powell was strictly a metalworker and refused to do even the simplest
jobs in wood-for that I had to go to the boss carpenter who was as able
producing what I wanted from my rough descriptions and drawings as
Powell was. I was thus able to obtain the equipment needed for both teach-
ing and research in experimental psychology. During my twenty years at
Bryn Mawr, among the numerous pieces of research equipment we con-
structed were an eye-movement camera for photographing and timing a
light beam reflected from the cornea; a kinohapt that enabled us to stimulate
spots on the skin in any desired order and with controlled time intervals; a
mechanical timer for controlling the time of and between three stimuli that
had the remarkable accuracy of something like one hundred-thousandth of
a second and with greater stability than any electronic timers I have since
seen; aesthesiometers ranging from one to fifty millimeters, which were
quickly interchangeable; stimulators for error of localization on the skin; a
trichromatic colorimeter; a variable gearshift for increasing or decreasing
the luminance of the Nagel adaptometer at controlled rates; and a stereoscope
permitting variations in interocular distance as well as in depth and in the
vertical direction. We also constructed many things for undergraduate teach-
ing needed in quantity that we could not afford to buy in the open market.
Since I only had to pay for the materials, our apparatus, counting the amount
received from Ferree and the small yearly appropriation, cost us about
$30,000 during my twenty years at Bryn Mawr. I cite these facts for the
benefit of those who may not be able to obtain large contracts or grants and
to contrast what we did with comparatively little money as compared with
what is spent nowadays for ready-made equipment.
In the case of most individuals, the early pattern of work and intellectual
development is set by the area of the doctoral thesis and/or the interests
of a teacher or the director of the dissertation. My first research was there-
fore concerned with problems having their origin in Gestalttheorie as shown
in the account of work done at the University of Kansas and some studies
during the first years at Bryn Mawr College. Most of my work was pub-
lished in the American Journal of Psychology, and, as Dallenbach received
HARRY HELSON 209

an article for the Journal in a new area, he urged me to settle down and
work in a single held. But I had to hnd something that was both interesting
and capable of continued exploration. One cannot, it seems to me, decide to
do programmatic research in a predetermined area; one must Iind new prob-
lems springing from his previous work or work in progress. Nor does one
necessarily start with a theory from which problems flow, as many logicians
would have us believe scientific exploration proceeds.
The greatest bar to creative work is, I have come to believe, acceptance
of scientific shibboleths and doing experiments according to prevailing stereo-
types in various fields of investigation. Most of my researches have been in-
spired by skepticism regarding the validity of generalizations and doubts as
to the fruitfulness of various approaches. Thus Judd and I began investigat-
ing vision with total as opposed to spot stimulation of the retina. Our studies
in strongly chromatic illumination were begun because I did not believe the
CIE (International Commission on Illumination) method of color specifi-
cation was adequate, based as it was on gauging the spectrum with small
foveal stimuli against a dark background. In the investigation of sensitivity
of the blind spot, I reversed the usual method of demonstrating its insen-
sitivity, which consisted of using a black stimulus on a white surround,
by employing instead a bright stimulus against a dark surround. When I
found the classical method of constant stimuli to be extremely tedious and
time consuming in determinations of the two-point threshold owing to the
rule that stimulus-separation had to be changed for each judgment, I did a
study with Shaad showing that there was no significant difference between
random presentation and repeated presentations of the same stimulus if sub-
jects were warned against making the stimulus error in their judgments.
Unsatisfied with the usual descriptive studies of the von Bezold "mixture"
effect, I decided to use line stimuli that could be varied in width and sepa-
ration in place of the artistic designs employed by von Bezold and others.
A series of quantitative studies eventuated with Rohles, Joy, and Steger,
which showed that color assimilation is subject to lawful, ordered variations
in the stimuli, leading from assimilation to contrast with a neutral zone in
which there is neither contrast nor assimilation. Finally, contrary to the usual
approaches in social psychology, we introduced the method of variation in
strength of social stimulation in a study by Edgar Schein during the time
that I was Thomas Welton Standord Fellow and acting professor at Stanford
in 1948-49, and also in the Texas studies with R. R. Blake and others.
In addition, two specific questions were destined to guide much of my
research: Is a neutral gray the end state of chromatic adaptation under all
conditions. e.g., with moving eyes and constant light flux on the whole
retina? What is seen in strongly chromatic illumination if the end result of
adaptation is not Hering's midgray? The answer to the second question was
embodied in the principle of color conversion: in every viewing situation
there is established an adaptation level, such that luminances above AL are
210 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tinged with the hue of the illuminant, those below are tinged with the after-
image complement to the illuminant hue, and luminances at or near AL
are either achromatic or weakly saturated hues of uncertain or changing
chromaticness. The work in chromatic illuminants was begun in 1928, and
the first publication was not until ten years later. As I have pointed out else-
where, no rhyme or reason appeared in hundreds of observations until we
substituted nonselective for selective stimuli. So long as we used chromatic
stimuli, we could not shake ourselves loose from their daylight appearance.
We were baffied in our attempts to relate the daylight colors to the chro-
matically illuminated colors: a daylight green on white background might be
seen as reddish or blue-green or neutral in red light, but all greens-light,
medium, and dark-were seen as reddish on black background in red light,
the former a more saturated red than the latter. After the principle of color
conversion was formulated, everything appeared clear and simple. Use of
nonselective stimuli freed us from the incubus of their daylight color be-
cause their hues in chromatic illumination would have to arise from the pre-
vailing conditions of vision, not from memory or any carry-over effect from
previous experience.
The principle of color conversion was responsible for many studies by
my colleagues and myself. It was tested by Higbee who used what amounted
to self-luminous stimuli in fields illuminated by chromatic sources; by Michels
and myself in reverse, so to speak, by requiring observers to synthesize light,
medium, and dark grays in the exit pupil of a colorimeter while the sur-
rounding area was illuminated with strongly chromatic light; and by Judd,
my daughter (Martha Warren Wilson), Josephine Grove, and myself in a
number of studies of color rendition in passing from daylight to incandescent
and fluorescent sources of illumination.
That the work in visual adaptation would lead to the theory of adapta-
tion level was certainly not intended or foreseen. The natural history of the
theory, which may be of interest, was as follows: first, there was the stark
fact that some stimuli in monochromatic light were achromatic, and the re-
flectance of the achromatic stimuli depended on the background. This led
to recognition of the operation of adaptation levels in vision. Then there was
recognition that PSE (point of subjective equality) in psychophysics was
also a manifestation of the working of adaptation levels in judgments of
sensory magnitudes.
Recognition of the role of the neutral point as the determining factor
in the qualitative structure of visual fields immediately suggested the possi-
bility of an analytic, quantitative approach to Gestalt phenomena. What the
Gestalt psychologists had to assume as a primitive, given datum or postulate,
it was now clear, could be accounted for in more general, basic terms. Not
only qualities like red and blue-green, warm and cold, pleasant and un-
pleasant, but sensory magnitudes were also seen to depend upon prevailing
adaptation levels. The same sound may be loud or soft, the same light bright
HARRY HELSON 211

or dim, depending on its relation to prevailing levels of stimulation. Adapta-

tion-level theory thus extends Gestalttheorie and furnishes a principle ac-
cording to which qualities and magnitudes can be ordered, thus accounting
for the organization of perceptual fields. Outside perception, when stimuli
and responses can be ordered on bipolar continua, the concept of adaptation
level can also be applied quite naturally. For example, in attitude studies, if
statements denoting degrees of agreement and disagreement toward an issue
are employed, those that elicit a neutral or indifferent response are indicative
of the adaptation level for that universe of discourse. Similar considerations
apply in the study of affectivity, learning, cognition, and personality because
practically all concepts, involving opposites as they do, can be ordered on
bipolar continua in which there are neutral or indifferent zones correspond-
ing to prevailing adjustment levels. Since neutral responses depend upon
all the stimuli impinging on the organism, the conditions under which they
act (such as their frequency, size, recency, and intensity), and upon resid-
uals from previous stimulation, adaptation levels vary from moment to mo-
ment and from person to person. Beginning with the study of sensory proc-
esses and psychophysical judgment, my colleagues and I extended our in-
vestigations into almost every basic area of psychology. These, as well as
studies by others bearing directly on the theory, and a number of unpub-
lished studies of our own were brought together in my book (Helson, 1964b).
I was able to start this book while holding appointment as Hogg Foundation
Research Scholar at the University of Texas (1956-57) largely because of the
support and interest of the associate director of the Hogg Foundation, Dr.
Wayne Holtzman. The book grew as I worked on it, and its progress was
materially aided by a research leave from the University of Texas in 1958-59
and by a light teaching load at Kansas State University where it was finally
completed in 1963.
A comment is in order regarding some demands made on the theory of
adaptation level. After the first publication appeared, I received many letters
asking what the weighting constants should be for series, background, and
residual stimuli under conditions we had not investigated. I have not been
able to see why this theory should give answers that no other theory has
been asked to give in advance of experimentation. Constants in equations
must be determined empirically. Weighting coefficients determined under
one set of conditions do not necessarily hold for different conditions. A merit
of adaptation-level theory is that it can be applied to many problems, but it
must not be oversimplified or used without regard to the sense of concrete
situations.
The outbreak of the Second W orId War was, for many academic as
well as other people, a turning point in their lives. Shortly after the attack
on Pearl Harbor, I wrote to the Department of the Army offering my services
in any capacity whatsoever. I doubt if there was a reply, and I was not one
of the psychologists over forty years of age tapped for military service. In the
212 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

spring of 1942, Drs. Thornton Fry and Samuel Fernberger, representing the
National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), came to me and asked if
(1) I believed fruitful work could be done in the study of handwheel con-
trols of anti-aircraft guns and allied equipment such as tracking and director
devices; and (2) would I be willing to head a project concerned with such
study in the neighborhood of Philadelphia? I replied affirmatively to both
questions and was invited to participate in a conference held at the Foxboro
Company, in Foxboro, Massachusetts, Having gone that far and wishing to
participate in some measure in the war effort, I could not refuse to go to
Foxboro, even though I had understood originally that it would not be neces-
sary to move my family and household effects in agreeing to head a project.
We sold our house in June, 1942, for exactly what we had paid for it, not
realizing that the coming inflation would hit housing harder than any other
single item in our economy. We moved first to Sharon, Massachusetts, and
then to Foxboro. These were the first of half a dozen moves during the war
period, with more to come later.
The Foxboro project was actually a joint engineering-psychology affair,
with the head of Foxboro's Research and Development Division, Mr. William
Howe, and myself as codirectors. The resources of the Foxboro Company
engineering staff were at our disposal and intensive work on the design of
our research equipment began in June and continued until early fall when
we were ready to begin our research. Trained psychologists were not im-
mediately available, but we began with one person besides myself in a small
room of one of the buildings and added more personnel and space as we
needed them. In less than a year from the time we started, we had produced
several reports to the services, and NDRC offered to build more adequate
quarters for the project. We persuaded President Atwood of Clark University
to grant Dr. Robert Brown leave of absence to join us, and later Dr. Sidney
Newhall also came to us. Our nonprofessional staff also grew because hun-
dreds of records had to be analyzed every week, data had to be statistically
treated, and apparatus had to be built, rebuilt, and constantly recalibrated.
Since only a small part of the work done at Foxboro was published in
public form (Helson, 1949), some idea of the variety and extent of work
accomplished in the years 1942 through 1944 may be of interest here.
Following is a partial list of subjects covered in reports to NDRC, the services,
and various organizations:
Handwheel speed and accuracy of tracking,
Relative accuracy of handwheel tracking with one and both hands,
Inertia, friction, and diameter in handwheel tracking,
Accuracy of tracking by means of handwheel controls,
Simultaneous hand and foot operation of tracking and ranging controls,
Direct tracking and simultaneous stadiametric ranging,
Tracking with illuminated and nonilluminated oscilloscopes,
Influence of visual magnification on accuracy of tracking,
HARRY HELSON 213

Improvement in direct, aided, and velocity tracking through magnification of data

presentation,
Effects of target speeds and rates of turning on accuracy of direct handwheel
tracking,
Factors responsible for visual fatigue in the presentation of data with oscilloscopes
and suggestions for their alleviation,
Latency in the formation of the retinal image and tracking,
Studies of aided and velocity tracking.
From the many Foxboro studies, I was able to make a number of gen-
eralizations having applicability beyond the particular types of equipment
and conditions of operation employed in those investigations. The hrst gen-
eralization was the U-hypothesis, according to which human performance
tends to be optimal over a fairly broad band of stimulus values, such as hand-
wheel gear ratios and inertia, but above and below this band, performance
becomes noticeably poorer. We can also subsume sensitivity curves for pitch,
loudness, brightness, and other sensory dimensions to the U-hypothesis, in
that they have the same shape as the error curves found in tracking per-
formance. The U-hypothesis now seems to be quite generally accepted by
workers in human engineering and human factors. A second generalization,
although not as broadly applicable as the U-hypothesis, may nevertheless
serve as an heuristic principle in the design of equipment. This is the prin-
ciple of "generality or transferability of the optimal condition." It refers to
the fact that a condition or variable that is good in one complex of conditions
tends to be good in other constellations of conditions. The third generaliza-
tion was the principle of offset or compromise, and it states that, if it is not
possible to incorporate the optimal value of a parameter in designing equip-
ment, other parameters may be adjusted to offset the deleterious value to a
greater or lesser extent. Thus if it is not possible to use gear ratios for fast
turning to track distant slow targets because of the much faster rates re-
quired for near targets, the radius of the handwheel may be increased, thereby
increasing the amount of arm movements which enter into the advantage
found in fast handwheel speeds. The fourth generalization concerned the
role of internal norms in performance. Internal norms determine the "par"
performance of an individual and are set by characteristics of equipment as
well as by organismic factors, such as keenness of vision and hearing, mus-
cular development, and the degree of motivation and frustration tolerance.
These generalizations are mentioned because work dealing with design
of equipment and human factors has been criticized on the basis that this
field is "full of information that is apparently very correct but which repre-
sents only one point on what should have been a curve showing how one
variable is functionally related to another" (Wood, quoted in Helson, 1964b).
As stated above, the approach at Foxboro was to determine the curves relat-
ing performance over a wide range of variables, and it was because of this
approach that we were able to extract information of a general nature,
 214 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

not only the four principles just discussed, but also others. The moral of all
this is, of course, that budding psychologists should be trained to design
experiments that will yield general principles. The Foxboro studies showed
that it is possible to obtain valid generalizations even from research having
a strong practical bias. The rank empiricism that pervades psychology today
can be traced to several sources, chief of which is the way students are taught,
the types of research which are easiest to get published, and the safety of
sticking to particular facts which are valid in themselves, but have few im-
plications beyond their own frames of reference.
By the time all of the Foxboro studies were declassified, my interests
had shifted to problems connected with adaptation-level theory, and I laid the
Foxboro results aside. Some of the studies became available from the Pub-
lication Board, Office of Technical Services, U. S. Department of Commerce,
but I myself never saw them in that form and never checked to see how
many of the Foxboro studies were available there. I can repeat here the
late Franklin V. Taylor's judgment concerning the Foxboro work that "It
was the pioneer work in human factors in this country" because I consider
it a tribute, not only to myself, but also to Drs. Samuel Fernberger and Thorn-
ton Fry, who had the vision of fitting equipment to men in contrast to the
traditional approach of fitting men to jobs and machines through selection
and training. Of course both approaches, optimal design of machines for
human operation and selection and training, are necessary for best perform-
ance. The former philosophy was made most explicit in the Foxboro ap-
proach, as well as the idea of investigating the whole range of variables like
handwheel speed and inertia in order to determine optimal regions and
breaking points in the use of manipulanda. The studies concerned with de-
sign of equipment since the end of the war may have been due to the
Zeitgeist, but I like to think that the Foxboro project had something to do
with getting it started, if it is proper to speak of activating a Geist!
While I was at Stanford on sabbatical leave from Bryn Mawr, I was
invited to Brooklyn College as chairman and professor, and I decided to
accept. I little realized that being chairman of a large department would be
so different from being chairman at Bryn Mawr. The paper work seemed
never to end-as soon as material for one catalogue was sent in, another had
to be done, and the matter of staffing was a constant source of worry. In my
second year at Brooklyn, Dallenbach asked me to go to Texas, and I was most
happy to relinquish the duties of chairman and resolved never again to ac-
cept an appointnment involving administrative work. When I went to Texas,
I was in my fifty-third year and did not expect to make another move before
retiring, but fate would have it otherwise. One of the best things about life
is that it contains unforeseen, pleasant surprises. My move to Kansas State
University had its origins in a meeting with Dr. William Bevan at the New
Orleans conference of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology
in the middle 1950's. My friendship and collaboration with Bevan had its
HARRY HELSON 215

beginnings at that time. We corresponded about mutual psychological prob-

lems from then on, and during a research leave from Texas that I spent in
Berkeley, he invited me to be visiting professor at Kansas State University
during the second semester of the 1960-61 academic year. The semester
spent there was so stimulating and fruitful that I accepted the invitation to
fill the first named chair at Kansas State.
I have mentioned a number of topics and areas in which I have worked,
but some others may come as a surprise to those who are not familiar with
them. Though I have not been regarded as a physiological psychologist, sev-
eral of my publications are either directly concerned with or have a bearing
on physiological mechanisms. Among these studies, I would first single out
the investigation of vision in the blind spot which forced me to the conclu-
sion there is a primitive type of light sensitivity there that is not explained
by light scattering or excitation of receptors contiguous to this area. I be-
lieve my view of the sensitivity of the macula coeca will be vindicated in
time. Two other studies in the physiological area were undertaken at the sug-
gestion of practicing neurologists. The first was to determine if the paralgesias
and formications reported by patients following total or subtotal section of
the trigeminal nerve for relief of tic douloureux are "imaginary" or the result
of some residual sensitivity in the area deprived of fifth nerve supply. Care-
ful tests, some using psychophysical methods, showed there was indeed
some residual sensitivity to deep pressure, in localization of a single point,
and in response to extremely hot stimulation. Complete loss of sensitivity to
extreme heat occurred when, in addition to section of the sensory root, a
thoracic sympathectomy had been performed. In a foreword to this study,
published in Brain (1932), Dr. Charles H. Frazier asked if these facts did
not point to afferent as well as efferent functions of the sympathetic system.
The other study, with Lucena Quantius, undertaken at the suggestion of
another neurologist, Dr. Theodore Weisenberg, was to determine whether
emotional states could influence surface body temperature. The results
showed that they could and did under experimentally controlled conditions,
thus confirming the clinical observations made by Dr. Weisenberg (with
Quantius, 1934).
Three other studies also belong in the physiological category. The first
of these was by Guilford and myself (1933), showing tha~ absolute visual
thresholds are lower in dark-eyed than in light-eyed individuals, the largest
difference being between Negroes and light-eyed whites. However, the dif-
ferences between eye groups decreased from fovea to periphery, where they
ceased to be statistically significant. This study points to a more direct partici-
pation of the retinal or choroidal pigment in vision than is usually supposed
when it is credited only with reduction in light scattering inside the eye. The
interested student will find other types of evidence cited in this article in
favor of the importance of the retinal pigment in vision.
Finally, two studies showing the importance of accommodation and sur-
 216 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

roundings on perception of size should be mentioned here. In the first I

found that objects fixated through a pinhole with maximal accommodation
and excluding all other objects were perceived to be much smaller than when
viewed in free vision. A critical test of the role of accommodation and the
influence of surround on apparent size was next made by projecting after-
images in tubular vision. Afterimages were projected at various distances
through a black tube just large enough to accommodate the images. Although
measured size increased with distance of projection, apparent size did not.
Emmert's law does not hold, therefore, in reduced vision. It thus appears
that accommodation, perspective, and surround influence perceived size. The
breakdown of Emmert's law, so far as perceived size is concerned, must be
because there is no relaxation of accommodation and because perspective
relations are ruled out in tubular vision.
Although I appreciate attempts to link behavioral and physiological
processes, I have tried to avoid the use of extra behavioral models and inter-
pretations to bolster experimental findings. Well established correlations be-
tween stimulus conditions and observable behavior can lead to control and
prediction of responses and also to fruitful, verifiable theories. I have seen
many fads in types of interpretation come and go. By this I refer to the habit
of some psychologists to offer explanations of their data in the language of
the latest concepts in physics, chemistry, physiology, or engineering in an
endeavor to supply a more scientific substrate for their findings. In this con-
nection William James said,
The aspiration to be "scientific" is such an idol of the tribe to the present
generation, is so sucked in with his mother's milk by everyone of us, that we feel
it hard to conceive of a creature who should not feel it ... (1890, p. 640).

The greatest accomplishments in psychology have seemed to me to con-

sist of concepts, generalizations, and theories that stay close to data or have
direct reference to observable behavior, such as the Purkinje and Bezold-
Brucke phenomena, the laws of association, the principles of conditioning,
the concept and "laws" of Gestalt, and the laws of mass action and equipoten-
tiality. These concepts do not go outside the universe of discourse of the data
they generalize, and I believe they are far more "scientific" and useful than
most explanations in terms of hypothetical constructs, which attempt, for
example, to equate brain function with computers and sensory-motor be-
havior with servomechanisms. Organisms do decode and encode, take advan-
tage of feedback, and adjust to rates and accelerations of inputs, but they also
do much more and hence should not be completely identified with the latest
man-made devices, clever and efficient as they may be. Behavior offers a much
richer variety of phenomena than does any machine, and we are far from
having exhausted the potentialities for theory immanent in perception, judg-
ment, learning, cognition, imagination, and the feelings and emotions.
In closing I would like to make a few personal observations regarding
HARRY HELSON 217

such matters as differences in recall between youth and middle age, the kind
of person I think I am professionally, my methods of work, my immediate
family, and the kind of world young people now entering psychology seem
to me to face.
Differences in recall between youth and middle age were brought home
quite forcibly when I was asked to do a critical survey of the "New Look"
approach to perception and personality in 1951. While working on this
project, the contrast between my ability to recall at twenty-five and at fifty-
three years of age was greater than I had supposed before undertaking this
job. When reading and writing up the Gestalt literature for my doctoral dis-
sertation, I had an almost photographic memory. I could recall the titles of
the articles, the periodical, year, volume, and pages of each publication, and
I was able to give the exact page on which a given point was made. Perhaps
the concentration required to read the material in German helped fix it so
minutely and securely for later recall. But twenty-seven years later, complete-
ness and certainty in recall were far less. Although I could recall various
points, I was not always sure who had made them; the exact journal or book
would often escape me. Every detail had to be checked against notes on the
reading. The same thing occurred in the writing of my book begun five years
later, but there were good reasons for this in the case of the book: the num-
ber of items read was far greater, and the interval between original impres-
sion (reading) and recall was much longer, since it took seven years to com-
plete the manuscript of Adaptation-Level Theory. The one bright lining in
all this is that I find little or no difference between 1951 and 1965 in my
ability to recall what I have read.
Because faculties are so much keener, enthusiasm so much greater, and
storage and retrieval of information so much better in youth than in middle
and later life, it is a pity that better use is not made of the early years by
more people, outside as well as inside academia. There are, of course, com-
pensating factors in later life. One does not need to spend time working in
various areas before settling down to a major interest, and one is less likely
to be concerned with side issues or unimportant minutiae of problems that
more creative minds have explored. I have frequently been struck by the
good work older psychologists often produce in what is for them totally new
areas, and it must be because they see basic issues better than do many
inexperienced younger men. ~
Self-assessment is difficult and, according to the depth psychologists,
can only be made by probing into the subconscious. However, I believe that
conscious as well as subconscious motivations play a part in human behavior.
So far as I am able to judge, I have not been motivated by a spirit of com-
petition to equal or outdo anyone else. I have set my own standards of
accomplishment, and these have been intrinsic to the problems that have
engaged me. I have seldom, if ever, been able to meet my own criteria of
good work. What l\1cDougall called the "self-regarding sentiment" must be
218 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

very strong in me, since I feel I have not met my own standards of accom-
plishment. It was a self-image I have tried to live up to, not position in a
group or the accomplishment of other psychologists. Nor have I ever been
conscious of being in competition with others in professional matters.
My manner of working and writing can best be characterized as slow,
deliberate, and replicative. By this I refer to the fact that in almost every
case there was a preliminary or pilot study, followed by the experiment itself,
and often a second and third replication. In this way I satisfied myself that
results were not due to biassed sampling of subjects or the idiosyncrasies of
experimenters. After I considered an experiment completed, I usually laid
the results away for several months or years before writing for publication.
I write and rewrite at least half a dozen times before sending manuscripts to
be published. Writing has been a slow, painful process, not only to achieve
a tolerable style but also, and perhaps more important, to communicate my
ideas clearly and forcefully. In a science that must largely use language
rather than mathematical symbols to convey ideas, the way in which mate-
rial is presented is of prime importance. I was especially impressed by the
importance of good writing during the six years that I was editor of the
Psychological Bulletin. By this I do not mean that a slick or purely literary
form of presentation can make up for a paucity of ideas or superficial think-
ing. The mature worker in any field can tell how hard and how deeply one
has probed by the way one's publications read. The greatest compliment I
ever received came from Titchener when he said of the two articles he edited
for American Journal of Psychology, "I can see that you have sweat blood
over these." I have always had a backlog of twenty to thirty unpublished
studies and do not expect to have everything in print by the end of my career.
No account of a life is complete without mention of one's immediate
family. In many ways the kind of person one is, his goals, aspirations, and
pattern of life may be reflected in his immediate family, for they are influ-
enced by the minor as well as major nuances of the paterfamilias. To say
that I was most fortunate in choice of a wife may sound hackneyed, but it is
true. My wife, Lida, took all the burden of the household, rearing of chil-
dren, and the social amenities, leaving me free to concentrate on my work.
As a result, the little time I had for home life in the days when our children
were young was relaxed and pleasant-I did only such chores as I chose, and
they took very little time from my work. Moreover, she has given me con-
stant moral support and has put up with my idiosyncrasies, as few in her
place would have done. To say the least, lowe her much for whatever
success I have had professionally as well as for many other things in our life
together.
My son, Henry, early showed a predilection for mathematics and physics,
and I helped and encouraged him along these lines as much as I was able.
It was not long before he was beyond me in mathematics, and, by the time
he entered college, he was ready for advanced work in this subject. He is now
HARRY HELSON 219

a mathematician teaching at Berkeley. My daughter, Martha, was originally

bent on a medical career and took the courses in college necessary for en-
trance to medical school, but she has ended up as a physiological psychologist.
In addition, my son's wife, Ravenna Mathews Helson, and my daughter's
husband, William A. Wilson, Jr., are also psychologists, and, with my wife's
interest in remedial reading, we have become an almost 100 percent family
of psychologists!
As one comes to the close of an account of one's personal life in these
precarious days, one cannot but be concerned with the problem of man-
kind's survival. I did not expect to live through two world wars, the second
on a greater scale and more savage toward civilian populations than the first,
and to face the imminent possibility of total destruction in a third world
war. The main problem, it seems to me, from now on is to prevent an atomic
war that will obliterate western civilization or set it back for centuries by
making the land uninhabitable and by poisoning the water supplies. I do
not believe young men now beginning their careers can withdraw as com-
pletely from national and world issues as many of my generation have done.
Science plays such a large part in government, the military, industry, and
wherever we turn, and the issues are so fraught with danger, that the younger
generation must find a way of making the most of its scientific capabilities
while at the same time doing its share to ameliorate internal as well as ex-
ternal tensions and educate mankind to settle outstanding issues peaceably.
Psychology has an important part to play in all this as a scientific discipline,
but individual psychologists, along with other scientists and intellectuals,
must be prepared for direct personal involvement if we are to avoid catas-
trophe from within or without. It looks as if life will be more hazardous,
will offer more challenges, and will demand much more from the coming
generations than it did from ours.

REFERENCES

Selected Publications by HaTTY Helson

The psychology of Gestalt. Amer. ]. Psychol., 1925, 36, 342-370, 494-526;
1926, 37, 25-62, 189-223.
Insight in the white rat. ]. expo Psychol., 1927, 10, 278-296.
The part played by the sympathetic system as an afferent mechanism in the region
of the trigeminus. Brain, 1932, 55, 114-121.
(with Guilford, J. P.) The relation of visual sensitivity to the amount of retinal
pigmentation. ]. gen. Psychol., 1933, 9, 58-76.
(with Lucena Quantius) Changes in skin temperature following intense stimula-
tion.]. expo Psychol., 1934, 17, 20-35.
Design of equipment and optimal human operation. Amer. ]. Psychol., 1949, 62,
473-497.
Perception and personality-a critique of recent experimental literature. USAF
220 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

School of Aviation Medicine, Report No. 1 (Project No. 21-0202-0007),

1953, 1-53.
(with J. A. Steger) On the inhibitory effects of a second stimulus following the
primary stimulus to react. J. expo Psychol., 1962, 64, 201-205.
Current trends and issues in adaptation-level theory. Amer. Psychologist, 1964,
19, 26-38. (a)
Adaptation-level theory: An experimental and systematic approach to behavior.
New York: Harper & Row, 1964. (b)

Other Publications Cited

James. William. Principles of psychology. Vol. II. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1890.
 Geraldine Elzin

221
Walter R. Miles
I was born on March 29, 1885 in Dakota Territory, where my parents
and grandparents had taken up homestead land on the great prairie. They
had emigrated from Indiana following the depression of the late 1870's. My
grandfather Richard White, a prosperous farmer, lost his good farm and all
other property in Indiana through the generous but unfortunate gesture of
signing as guarantor for his neighbors. This sad event was sometimes re-
ferred to in my childhood but like many other things I then heard I did not
understand. There were various verbal confusions in those early days; one
was about Indians and Indiana. Our family had corne from Indiana but it
was here in Dakota that we thought about Indians and their possible incur-
sions.
My earliest recollections are of the great endless prairie. Its clear air
afforded me a vast special view of our world. No hills, no trees obstructed
the seemingly endless expanse of flat land. Far away the prairie met the sky.
As a small boy I tended our flock of sheep, keeping them out of the wheat
fields. We, the sheep and I, were visible to the parents at horne. There were
gophers that ran down holes when I carne near; there were skylarks that
would fly up and sing. There were wild rose bushes with sweet-smelling
blossoms. I seem to have talked to myself about these features of the land-
scape as my father talked to me when we viewed them together.
Now I can see myself as a small boy sitting on my father's lap as with
his oxen he ploughed one long furrow after another. Perhaps more than once
a wild duck's nest was ploughed up and we stopped to catch the little
ducks. The buffalo had gone from the land but there were white bones
sometimes in the buffalo wallows. I found most interesting my father's ex-
plaining the buffalo skulls, especially the holes where once had been the
eyes and the ears. My father took me with him when he drove to the grain
elevator to buy wheat. The great tall elevator gave me my first experience of
echo and I loved to repeat it. The elevator ran by horsepower and my job was
to keep the horse going. In Dakota most of my play was alone, but after
my brother was born when I was five, I was often given care of him. I liked
to be with him and there was satisfaction in this responsibility.
Eventually my father sold the homestead and bought a country store.
223
224 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

We lived over the store and were all busy together upstairs and down.
Across from our store was a blacksmith shop in which I spent free time
watching the smith as he formed the iron shoes and fitted them to the horses'
hooves.
I remember the one-room school where as the smallest child I sat in
the front row. Every morning the big boys brought their revolvers and guns
to place on a table by the teacher and near me. I liked to imagine that those
were my guns. I suppose I was an attentive child at school; I know I tried
to remember what the teacher told us.
When I was eight years old a great change occurred. Our family, the
grandparents, and an uncle and his family all moved from North Dakota to
the village of Scott's Mills in northwest Oregon about twenty-five miles east
of Salem, the capital. To me this change in environment was truly astonish-
ing. Here in this new land we were surrounded by steep hills, and beyond
them the high mountains reached to the Cascade Range. Hills and moun-
tains were covered with wonderful wild trees. In our valley were rows of fruit
trees bearing cherries, apples, pears, and plums. And nearby was a river of
clear water! This gave power for an old sawmill and for an active Hour mill.
Here in our village was a new two-story schoolhouse and a new Friends'
Church with a church bell.
My father bought the large two-story general store building and goods.
Grandfather helped him in this store. We lived near. My uncle rented the
sawmill and operated it. Soon I was employed after school and during vaca-
tions helping him in various ways, with shingles, lath and stacking boards,
"big knots, little knots, and clear." By the time I was fourteen I worked at a
saw-table cutting parts for fruit boxes and trays for drying fruit. Finally, I
was in charge of assembling both boxes and fruit trays, earning good wages.
Of course I continued to help in the store when I was needed.
I can never forget the great calamity that befell us when I was twelve.
The store caught £ire from another burning building one night and burned
to the ground. The insurance was days overdue! We were literally wiped
out. But everyone was kind. We bought an empty building and went into
business again.
The school in Scott's Mills was good for a village of its size in Oregon
at that time. We were not all in one little close room. Among the teachers
we had I think of two who were outstanding. Mabel H. Douglas, a graduate
of Penn College, was a sister of Woods Hutchinson, a popular scientific
writer of that period. She was a skillful, understanding, and likable teacher.
In the upper grades we were taught by the principal, who knew how to
teach us so that we liked to be in his classes. He often acted out the things
he was teaching. I graduated from this school in 1900 and was about ready
to enter the Preparatory Department of Pacific College in Newberg. The
£inancial problem was solved for the time being by my living at home for one
WALTER R. MILES 225

year more and working full time for my uncle. One of my teachers tutored
me in Latin and Algebra.
In 1901 I went to the Academy in Newberg some thirty-five miles from
Scott's Mills. I was fortunate in being selected as helper or chore boy in
return for my room and board in the president's house. My class group num-
bered twenty-five. This in itself was stimulating. I enjoyed my classes, kept
up my work, and was able to play on the football squad. I graduated in June
1902. When autumn came I entered Pacific College. Now in return for my
tuition and maintenance, my jobs were stoker of the wood-burning furnace
in the main college building and houseman in the men's dormitory. These
jobs I held most of the time I was at Pacific College, adding what outside
chores I could find. In the summers I returned home and worked for my
uncle in the box factory and the prune dryer.
One of my employers in Newberg, Dr. Minthorn, formerly principal
of Pacific Academy, told me of his nephew and my cousin Herbert Hoover
who after graduating in the first class at Stanford University had become a
successful mining engineer. It was about this time that I began to think
about further college work and about teaching as a profession. My favorite
teacher at Scott's Mills, Mrs. Douglas, was now my history teacher in the
college.
In my senior year I found what I had unknowingly been looking for.
This was my best course so far, psychology, taught by our President, Edwin
McGrew. The textbook for the course was James' Psychology, Briefer Course.
I found other psychology books and read them. I reread James. My studies,
especially those in science, interested me greatly. I also enjoyed instruction
in public speaking. I was chosen valedictorian of my class.
During the summer of 1906 I had a fine outdoor job as a forest-fire
warden in the mountains of southern Oregon. There were deer, bears, and
other wild creatures in this area. On returning home at the end of this de-
lightful experience I gave my rifle to my father to sell. I hoped that I would
never have occasion to shoot another wild creature.
Several circumstances now favored Earlham College for my further
education. My interest in psychology and public speaking may have helped
in Earlham's offering me a scholarship. A widowed aunt of my mother in-
vited me to become her helper and general chore man. She lived comfort-
ably, within walking distance of the college, and I was assured that the con-
ditions she offered would be agreeable. And so it proved. There were some
of my advisors at Newberg who regarded Earlham as too liberal in its re-
ligious attitude at this time. But for me the opportunity seemed the right
one and I never regretted my acceptance.
Professor J. Hershel Coffin while completing his thesis for the Ph.D. in
psychology at Cornell had been appointed to succeed Professor Edwin D.
Starbuck who, coming from James at Harvard, had set up a small experi-
226 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

mental psychological laboratory at Earlham. In a brochure I had seen a pic-

ture of it and this had increased my interest in coming to Earlham.
Professor Coffin invited me to become his assistant in the elementary
course. He explained that no money was available for this assistantship, but
I was glad to accept the opportunity on these terms. My two courses with
Professor Coffin came first in my program of endeavor. In the experimental
laboratory with an older student as my teammate we worked through one
of Titchener's manuals. I still have that notebook. I enrolled also for courses
with Professor Elbert Russell in Bible study; Professor Dennis in biology;
Edwin Trueblood, public speaking; and William N. Trueblood, English lit-
erature. These were all able teachers; several of them had done graduate
work at great universities. All of them were devoted in their work and in-
spiring to me.
Professor William N. Trueblood who was my neighbor also became
my friend as I helped him fill his silo and in other farm activities. He adopted
me as a sort of nephew. In trips that we made about the country he in-
troduced me to his hobby of fossil collecting. Neither in Dakota nor in Ore-
gon had there been anything like this. I began to read Darwin.
I became an active member of the English Club and in my senior year
was its president. I graduated from Earlham in 1908. I was grateful to the
College and to Aunt Mary who had helped to make this experience pos-
sible. I returned to Oregon with an offer of a pastorate in a Midwestern city,
which I appreciated but could not bring myself to accept.
Shortly after my return home I received an offer from Penn College
to fill a temporary vacancy in psychology and education. The salary was
$600 if single, $700 if married. I accepted the $700. I worked in my father's
greenhouses; my parents had sold all their property in Scott's Mills and
moved to a place north of Newberg. I assisted my future father-in-law in
building a new barn. Elizabeth Mae Kirk, my Pacific College sweetheart,
and I were married September 1, 1908, and left Oregon the next day for
Oskaloosa, Iowa.
The year of teaching at Penn College was busy and challenging. My
psychology students were eager, some recognizably able. Years later one of
my students, Alexander C. Purdy, became a leader in the Hartford Semi-
nary and eventually its dean. Another, Clarence Pickett, taught for many
years at Earlham and was later general secretary of the American Friends
Service Committee.
One morning at Penn College there came quite unexpectedly a stranger
to my classroom. He was Professor Carl E. Seashore of the State Univer-
sity of Iowa. A dean of graduate studies, he was engaged in recruiting gradu-
ate students to the University. He met other faculty members, lectured to
my students, we talked, and I agreed to visit the University at Iowa City.
Our discussions and the visit resulted in my acceptance as a graduate stu-
dent in Iowa University.
WALTER R. MILES 227

During the summer of 1909 my wife and I made a home visit to Oregon.
Since our marriage and departure there had been two deaths we both felt
deeply, that of her father and of my young brother. The visit helped and
refreshed us. With warm sustaining wishes from home we arrived back in
Iowa and I began my studies at the University. A graduate scholarship,
selling life insurance, and student coaching helped me financially. Lectures,
seminars, study, and the writing of a master's thesis filled the time. The
thesis, '·A Comparison of Elementary and High School Grades" (1910), led
to unexpected commendation and a present of books from Professor E. L.
Thorndike.
In the spring our son, Thomas Kirk Miles, was born and my wife's
mother came to join us and help. My need to be practical and, as it now
appears to me, my lack of information regarding the opportunities in psy-
chology, had led me to secure the master's degree in education. But the
year's experience, especially the laboratory course with Dean Seashore's
able associate, Dr. l\1abel C. Williams, and our close association and friend-
ship with Dr. and Mrs. Seashore were influences pulling me toward psy-
chology.
An unexpected offer of a pastorate in the Friends Church of West
Branch, Iowa, two hours by train from the University helped my decision.
Accepting this gave us comfortable assured living. I could read and study
on the train. The pastorate was accepted and the move made. I became
a graduate student in psychology, attending lectures and seminars and read-
ing in all my spare time in the library of psychology and philosophy.
I found the work in Dr. Seashore's musicology laboratory fascinating;
his ingenious inventions beguiled me. Seashore's tonoscope seemed to me an
ideal instrument for research in one of several areas. I chose study of the
accuracy of the voice in simple pitch singing. I had seventeen mature men
as subjects. Most of them had training in music, all sang solo, quartet, or
in glee clubs. How does accuracy of control vary with the range of the
voice? How does the intensity of the standard tone affect the pitch of re-
production? There were many phases to work out. The three years of re-
search and seminars were not easy years, travelling back and forth, but they
were happy and they were interesting.
Work with the tonoscope and with musical subjects was interesting,
sometimes delightful. My course work was completed in 1912 and the thesis
a year later. Our daughter, Caretta Elizabeth, was born in West Branch in
November 1911. The social life of our family centered around the Friends
Church. My interest outside the requirements of preaching and personal
parish contacts was in developing overall community events such as lectures
and musicales. A lively Chautauqua program took shape and even such so-
cializing as a great barbecue in which all the town and surrounding country-
side joined.
At the University I had become, while an education major, a member
228 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

of the education fraternity, Phi Delta Kappa. This contributed later, as will
be seen, to an unexpected eventuality. In the Iowa psychology department
I was honored by election to Sigma Xi shortly before Professor E. B. Titch-
ener came to Iowa as Sigma Xi visiting lecturer. During this visit Dr. Sea-
shore asked me to act as aide to our noted guest. This was indeed a prize
privilege, especially as it led to later contacts.
In the spring of 1913 I was asked to accept the Iowa Phi Delta Kappa
nomination as national secretary. This required visits to chapters in Eastern
colleges and attendance at the National Council Meeting in Philadelphia.
On this trip East I especially appreciated the opportunity to renew my ac-
quaintance with Professor Titchener at his home in Ithaca. It was during
this Phi Delta Kappa meeting in Philadelphia that I received, to my sur-
prise, a telegram from Professor Raymond Dodge asking if I might be inter-
ested in filling in for him for a year ( 1913-14) at Wesleyan. Indeed, I was
interested. After a meeting in New York with Professor Dodge and the
Wesleyan president the matter was concluded. I knew my wife would
concur.
Dean Seashore was pleased, as he said, "to have an Iowan product go
East." My final examinations were not all I could have wished but the thesis
I felt was satisfactory. It was published as a Psychological Review Mono-
graph. That year, 1913, the psychology department presented two of the
four Ph.D. candidates at the Iowa Commencement. The other two Ph.D.'s
given were one in chemistry and mathematics and one in political science
and English. My associate was Thomas Vance, long-time professor at Iowa
State College and through the years my friend.
We were sorry to leave our good friends in Iowa, but the new offer
seemed ideal. So the Miles family of four plus Grandmother Kirk left for
historical New England.
My Wesleyan appointment was announced in the college catalogue as
Associate Professor of Psychology with responsibility for four courses, all in
psychology. For me this had superb significance. Home life was happy and
relaxing. A second little girl, Marjorie Helen, was born in August. We were
comfortable in the quiet congenial surroundings of Middletown.
All my working hours were devoted to becoming acquainted with the
apparatus in Dodge's laboratory and with experimental methods represented
there, learning to know my students, and attempting to arouse in them in-
terest in the new and growing science of psychology. I thought about Wundt's
laboratory, Titchener's achievements, and Dodge's work with Erdmann in
Halle. I set up and demonstrated the nature and use of many pieces of
laboratory equipment. I worked through all of Dodge's publications that I
could find and reprints of other articles that were on the shelves in his labo-
ratory office, including such topics as reaction time of the eye, visual fixa-
tions in reading, the velocity of horizontal and vertical eye movements, and
WALTER R. MILES 229

other very interesting topics and data. I studied. New graphic ways of meas-
uring human behavior were of much interest to me and I enjoyed introduc-
ing them to my classes. In the elementary class we used Pillsbury's text
(1911) as was mentioned in the University catalogue.
Residence in Middletown, Connecticut, opened also a new geographical
area to the westerner. New York, Boston, and New Haven were within
practical reach. My first attendance at the American Psychological Associa-
tion was in December 1913 when it met nearby at Yale. Professor Warren
of Princeton gave the presidential address on "The l\lental and the Physical."
My mentor, Dodge, introduced me to many psychologists hitherto only
names for me. I well remember l\1i.insterberg, Yerkes, l\1argaret Washburn,
Warren, and Angier who was head of the Yale psychology department. The
friendly secretary, W. V. Bingham, also took me in hand. I was happy to
be elected a member of AP A in 1914.
While I was in Nev,r Haven, Dodge told me of his work with Dr. F. C.
Benedict at the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory and invited me to visit him
in Boston. This I was able to do in February and was then much impressed
by the experimental program he was engaged in completing.
My commitment at Wesleyan was for a single year, so now a new posi-
tion had to be found. Correspondence was ini tiated. Then came a call from
Dr. Benedict asking me to consider continuing the type of investigation
Dodge had started at the Nutrition Laboratory. The position was full-time
research supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington at a location
in Boston close to the Harvard Medical School; this was indeed attractive
and I accepted. In the early summer of 1914 the Miles family moved to
Boston. I knew I would miss the teaching and the students, and the friendly
intercourse with the distinguished Wesleyan faculty.
At the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory the first weeks were fruitfully
and pleasantly spent with Dodge in orientation and in reading the manu-
script for the monograph he was engaged in writing. Then I was on my
own. My first assignment at Dodge's suggestion was a rerun of Dodge's Sub-
ject VI with vigorous checks. This man was available and his services were
secured. A detailed examination of previous planning was followed by thirty
hours of new testing: six hours per day for five consecutive days in one
week. The worked-up results for this new testing gave satisfactory agree-
ment with the earlier findings, indicating not failure to cooperate on the
subject's part but rather a deviant constitution in his case.
This was my first experience in applying a repeated program of physio-
logical-psychological measurements of a human subject on consecutive days.
It was the type of experimental approach I would use in most of my work
at the Carnegie Laboratory. This first set of data concerned the measurable
influence supposedly produced by a small amount of properly diluted ethyl
alcohol taken at a certain time on alternate days of testing. A report of this
230 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

work was prepared in a brief paper introduced by Dr. F. G. Benedict. I

had the honor of reading this paper at a meeting at the National Academy
of Sciences in Washington, D.C., November 4, 1916.
The Laboratory had publicly announced a program of alcohol-nutri-
tional research. A part of this responsibility now rested upon me and I did
my best to discharge this duty in an objective, scientific manner. I devoted
much time to self-grounding in nutritional studies while carrying on instru-
mental planning, devising, and development and published descriptions of
some of my developments. Incidentally, we had a good instrument shop in
the basement of our laboratory and this was stimulating.
A second and more extensive series of measurements of alcohol effects
( 1918a) conducted as before under rigid test conditions led to conclusions
now generally accepted. Their practical value is familiar to educators and
utilized in modern traffic safety programs.
World War I brought new demands. Professor Dodge came to Boston
with an interesting problem that involved testing gas masks for both safety
and comfort. He carne to use some of our equipment and kindly utilized
my assistance also. The work resulted in recommendations influencing later
mask models.
I was glad to serve on a National Research Council Committee with
Leonard Troland and Harold Burtt who was chairman. We studied air pilot
aptitude, or tried to, on M.l.T. Flying School personnel. My laboratory
sessions with these men, one at a time, were in the evening.
Then came an offer of a captaincy for me in the Army Air Force, but
Dr. Benedict persuaded me to stay on in the Laboratory. He was convinced
there were war ration problems of first importance that trained researchers
were really obligated to attack. At first I was undecided but finally made up
my mind to stay and work in this new field. The special project Dr. Benedict
had in mind included a number of physiological and psychological factors
that we might measure during a rather long period of under-nutrition. Our
subjects would be young men of draft age. From Europe had come reports
minimizing the effects of reduced civilian rations. What was the truth in this
matter? The senior members of our staff worked together in the planning
and conduct of this experiment and in addition we had the excellent assist-
ance of Dr. Paul Roth of Battle Creek Sanitarium.
In September 1917 we proceeded, with two "equated groups" of healthy
young men from the Springfield Y.M.C.A. College, to test the effects of a
regime in which diet was reduced to two-thirds or less of the supposed caloric
requirement. In the Carnegie Laboratory a staff of ten workers carried on
periodic tests covering a wide range of body systems and functions. Both
physiological and psychological findings were clear-cut and the personal in-
tegrity and veracity of the subjects was demonstrated. Basal metabolism
measurements were made daily with equipment that was kept in the sub-
jects' quarters. Squad A at first restricted their diets until each man had lost
WALTER R. MILES 231

twelve percent in weight. Caloric intake was then increased to preserve the
lower weight level. The normal demand had been 3200 to 3600 calories per
day for these men. To maintain the reduced weight level about 2300 calories
were required. The heat output was lowered eighteen percent by the end of
this experiment. Pulse rate and blood pressure were markedly lower. I re-
corded electrocardiograms and found a condition quite comparable to brady-
cardia resulting from their reduced diet routine. Skin temperature was low-
ered and the men felt cold weather excessively. The nitrogen output was
about nine grams whereas for the control group it was about twice that
amount. The men looked emaciated.
Quite a variety of psychological tests were selected as suitable for repeti-
tion and were employed in this research. Some examples will illustrate the
body burden resulting from the reduced diet. In clerical tasks improvement
was slowed; finger movement speed was slowed. Eye movements measured
from photographic records were progressively slower. Strength of grip was
decreased. Several tests of accuracy showed that the number of errors in-
creased as the duration of the low-intake period lengthened.
Personal interviews after the low-diet experience had terminated re-
vealed that all Squad A members noticed a marked reduction in sex interest
and expression during the low-intake period (I919a). However, after the
conclusion of the prolonged experimental routine these men soon recovered
their feelings of well-being and energy. They had managed to keep up their
college work during the low diet months and individually were rather proud
of their contribution to the science of nutrition (I918b, 1919a, with F. G.
Benedict, 1919b).
Stimulating for me in these Carnegie years was the contact with our
near neighbors, the Harvard Medical School men. We met at lectures, semi-
nars, and in the cafeteria. Sometimes their visitors were brought over to
see us and our work. Among these medical colleagues and friends were
Walter Cannon, Cecil Drinker, Otto Folin, Alexander Forbes, Reid Hunt,
and Wallace Fenn.
Occasionally I attended Staff Meetings at the Boston Psychopathic
Hospital where Dr. E. E. Southard was chief psychiatrist. He and his re-
search associate Myrtelle M. Canavan, M.D. were at that time bringing
out a series of human brain studies of great relevance to psychophysiology.
At the Harvard Department of Psychology at Emerson Hall in Cambridge
I was a rather frequent visitor attracted there to see and discuss topics of
mutual interest with Sidney Langfeld, E. B. Holt, Leonard Troland and
Harold Burtt. It was always a pleasure to visit that active laboratory, to see
their approach to problems, and to meet and talk with their graduate stu-
dents. I like to recall loaning Edward C. Tolman a memory drum for use
in his Ph.D. work. An annual meeting of the psychologists of the Boston
area was always worth attending.
At the Carnegie Laboratory Dr. Eliot P. Joslin and Dr. Howard Root
232 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

were interested in studies on the metabolism of diabetic patients. Dr. Root

and I colla borated in psychological and also physic-anatomical studies of
some older diabetics and published our results jointly (with H. F. Root,
1922c, 1926). Dr. Root very kindly aided me by taking, as needed, blood
samples of my alcohol research subjects (1922b). My collaboration with Dr.
Joslin was of a different type. I aided him in reading the manuscripts and
galley proofs of his books. The association with these two men is for me
among the most valued in this period. In the spring of 1920 I was sched-
uled to visit laboratories in England and on the Continent as a representa-
tive of our laboratory. We now had a visitor with us for two or three weeks,
Dr. E. C. Van Leersum from Amsterdam. He was engaged in an effort to
develop and establish a National Institution of Nutrition in Holland. I
would meet him on his return home and be his house guest.
Before the war our inter-visitations had been a regular part of the Car-
negie program. We felt they were valuable for criticism and suggestions
and our friends abroad seemed also to favor the scheme. My tour in 1920
lasted four months, April to August. In all I visited nineteen cities: London,
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, Brussels, Louvain, Amster-
dam, Utrecht, Leyden, Groningen, Copenhagen, Lund, Stockholm, Ham-
burg, Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna. This was my first trip abroad and how
attractive it all seemed to me. The mission was to visit laboratories and
scientists and every day was full of interest. Representing the Nutrition
Laboratory and my colleagues I carried greetings to and visited many physi-
ologists from J. Alquier in Paris to Prof. H. Zwardemaker in Utrecht. These
scientists were cordial and wonderful hosts. Friendships began which have
lasted through the years; such were the meetings and discussions with E. D.
Adrian, Joseph Barcroft, Henry Dale, William Einthoven, August Krogh,
Edward Mellanby, and Augustus D. Waller. My large book of photographs
and notes has been reviewed and reviewed many times in the years that
followed.
At the time of my European trip there were several psychologists who
had established laboratories and were willing to welcome visitors. At Cam-
bridge University there was an excellent laboratory. It was a new wing added
to the physiology building and at the time Professor Frederick Bartlett was
in charge. It was stimulating to meet him and to see the excellent provisions
for experimental work in psychology. Charles Meyers had recently moved to
London and was in the throes of establishing the National Institution for
Applied Psychology and Physiology to investigate the problems of industry
and commerce. This project had the support of Professor Charles Sherrington.
At a meeting of the British Psychological Association at Bedford Col-
lege I listened with close interest to an address by Dr. E. W. Scripture on
the subject of graphic records of normal and abnormal speech. Scripture
had been the first to introduce W undtian psychology at Yale. Carl E. Sea-
shore was then his pupil so I was pleased to introduce myself as one of Pro-
WALTER R. MILES 233

fessor Seashore's pupils. At University College London, the psychology labo-

ratory was open at stated times and Professor C. S. Spearman had invited
me to tea. We had a pleasant conversation in which Professor Fr. Aveling,
J. C. Flugel, and Ll. Wynn Jones from North Wales took part. Jones was
lecturing here and spoke about his plans to open a laboratory at Leeds Uni-
versity in October 1920.
At the University of Glasgow there had been a Department of Psychol-
ogy housed in rooms loaned by the Department of Physiology. Now in-
creases in student enrollment following war's end had made it necessary to
give this space back to physiology, and so psychology was housed in an old
private mansion outside but near the University. Here I had long conver-
sations with Professor H. J. Watt. He had been a devoted student of Kulpe
and just before the war had made a visit to Germany. War began and he
was interned for two years. He was still obviously in a weakened condition.
At Oxford I found Professor William McDougall lately returned from
Zurich where he had worked with Dr. Carl Jung on methods of psycho-
analysis, a subject which McDougall had pursued during the war. With
McDougall in charge, psychology had flourished at Oxford for a few years.
Now with regret Professor Sherrington had, for lack of space, to turn out
Professor McDougall and his students from these rooms. However, it was
just at this time that Harvard invited McDougall to Cambridge. Professor
Miinsterberg had died quite early in the war and Harvard had delayed mak-
ing a new appointment. At the time of my visit McDougall and his wife
were pondering acceptance. They asked me many questions about life in
Boston and Cambridge which I did my best to answer reassuringly.
At the Sorbonne I was honored to meet Professor and Madam Pieron,
in their psychology laboratory. When I called they were determining the
sensitivity of areas of the retina to different wave lengths of light. An Amer-
ican post graduate student, David Wechsler, showed me about. Pieron was
now, he said, the successor of A. Binet. An Institute of Psychology seemed
a possibility. It would include Pieron, Janet, and Dumas. Pieron might then
do some lecturing in addition to his continuing research.
In Holland at the State University of Groningen an excellent labora-
tory of psychology had been included in the main University building which
was at this time about ten years old. There I talked with Professor G. Hey-
mans and Dr. Brugmans. They were working on problems of visual percep-
tion, some involving the hypothesis of thought transference. Our discussions
were of great interest to me. I looked about in the psychological laboratory
at the University of Copenhagen but Professor A. Lehman was on vacation.
A suite of several rooms seemed well equipped and serviced also by a good
department library.
At the University of Leipzig I was naturally most eager to visit the In-
stitute of Experimental Psychology, the traditional birthplace of our modern
science of psychology. My host here was Dr. A. Kirschmann, a German by
234 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

birth, who had been for several years professor at the University of Toronto.
T a recuperate from an illness he returned to Germany in 1913 and was
caught by the war. It was impossible for him to return to Canada. As a German
in Germany he was dismissed from the Toronto faculty. Professor Wundt,
still director of the Institute at the time, was greatly in need of an assistant
in the absence of all the younger men. Kirschmann was therefore asked to
join the Institute as an Ober Assistant, in the same position he had accepted
in 1893. At the time of my visit Professor Wundt, now eighty-eight years
old) had retired and was living in the country. The new director was Pro-
fessor Kruger with whom I had a brief conversation. I was glad to have
been in the founding laboratory although the atmosphere was gloomy at
this time. In contrast I had a cheerful visit in the Physiological Institute
conversing with Professor S. Garten. We had both worked on similar avia-
tion pilot problems during the war. Now we could shake hands, compare
results, and have a beer together. These brief visits made me want to see
and know more. I was impressed with some of the strange effects of the
war; many of them were in fact psychological phenomena.
At the time I visited these laboratories this type of experience was so
new that I thrived on it. During my tour I observed the child feeding pro-
gram of the American Friends Service Committee in Central Europe. Be-
cause of my interest in nutrition I had been asked to make a report of this
work which I was glad to find carried on effectively and with a favorable
degree of benefit to the seriously undernourished children.
Back in the United States I had much to tell and to show in photo-
graphs and collected reprints. My laboratory was still there, no one had
taken back the space, and I was contented to be in it again and working.
Now I turned back to the alcohol program beginning a long series of ex-
periments using two and three-fourths percent alcohol beverages. Both psy-
chological and some physiological data would be gathered and the results
published in a Carnegie monograph. I was happy in our Boston life and as-
sociations. There was however one lack: the inquiring and driving impulse
from younger minds. After Wesleyan I missed the contact with students.
Yet it was through no solicitation on my part that Dr. Ray Lyman
Wilbur, President of Stanford University, requested me to meet him in Bos-
ton for a discussion of their new psychology situation needs, following the
retirement of Professor Frank Angell, their early Wundtian disciple. Profes-
sor L. M. Terman, no laboratory man, had been lifted from the education
department to head psychology. He wanted to round out his staff with labo-
ratory and experimental workers. Dr. Wilbur's presentation of the situation
intrigued and attracted me. I saw that he was evidently enthusiastic for
this development. He emphasized for my consideration that the University
was growing rapidly. New strength had been added in several departments.
Funds for research were increasingly available. The psychology department
was especially favored by the Thomas Welton Stanford Fund. Living con-
WALTER R. MILES 235

ditions were favorable for faculty families. The University at that time granted
scholarships to accredited faculty children.
Professor Terman was known to me especially for his work during
World War I on the Army classification tests. He had impressed me most
favorably at psychology meetings where we had met. The Stanford oppor-
tunity pleased me. Soon I was able to write my acceptance to President
Wilbur. It was difficult for me to inform Dr. Benedict of my decision which
I knew he would not wish to accept. It was difficult to leave the dear Car-
negie Laboratory and Boston. Why was I doing this? I believe it was essen-
tially because of the teaching opportunity which I had enjoyed at Penn
College and at Wesleyan, and which appeared to me to be the chief asset
at Stanford. The number of graduate students was said to be increasing.
During recent years in Boston I had often wished that I could have young
ambitious psychologists working with me in exploratory development of
problems, in thinking about methods, in designing instruments, and in medi-
tating about results and conclusions. I had played a junior role with Coffin
at Earlham, with Seashore at Iowa, and in a sense with Dodge in Boston.
I felt this had been of definite importance in my own progress. Dr. Benedict
was generous to me personally in donating and selling to Stanford much
of the laboratory equipment Dodge and I had constructed, collected, and
utilized in the Carnegie Laboratory.
In December 1922 the Miles family left Boston for California. On our
Western way we were guests of an old friend of the Carnegie, Dr. John
Harvey Kellogg, at Battle Creek, Michigan. After family visits in Oregon
we arrived in due time in Palo Alto. Already housing had been arranged
for us in one of the two Hoover residences on the Stanford campus with
the T ermans as near neighbors. We received a warm reception from the
psychology group and their associates.
In our first year at Stanford I had besides preparing my lectures the
task of building up a working laboratory equipped with modern apparatus
and supplies. The material from Boston was a great help in giving an almost
immediate opportunity to start some graduate students in research. Thus
available to us was photographic equipment for recording magnified eye
movements during visual perceptual tasks, the ataxiameter (1922a) which
gave integrated readings of voluntary control in steadiness of standing, and
an advanced form of electrical apparatus for developing and measuring skill
in tracking-the electrical-pursuit meter (1921). We also had the Einthoven
string-galvanometer to record heart action and other bodily phenomena and
other minor pieces of new or novel equipment.
A piece of apparatus designed to provide a task for a human subject
and to give a score or measurable record of his performance seems to me to
offer a standing invitation to research curiosity. In our apparatus stockroom
I could now introduce some of our senior majors to available equipment.
I enjoyed teaching and came to it full of enthusiasm. No doubt my
236 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

methods were unskillful based as they were on meager experiences. I at-

tempted to select materials suitable to attract student interest. My procedure
in the introductory course was to present first a rather brief historical intro-
duction and then turn to illustrative problems that could be described in
detail and in some cases worked out in the classroom. A requirement in the
introductory class was that each student serve as a subject for two hours in
some investigation in progress in our department.
In the early 1920's Stanford was in a state of flux. For three decades
the general plan for the admission of students had brought in those recom-
mended by many preparatory schools of unequal status. Every student on
admission had to select a major subject of study; all else was elective. Now
the old order was under attack. Two committees especially were charged
with two major curriculum considerations. These were the Committees on
Admissions and on the Lower Division (freshmen and sophomores). Ter-
man and I were equally concerned about these problems and he was kind
enough to delegate membership on these two committees to me. I had thus
an opportunity to learn the history of the problems involved and to search
my psychological training, experience, and possibly insight as to ways and
means for arriving at some new conclusions.
The problem of admissions was paramount. The number of applica-
tions was much larger than Stanford could accept. The majority of these
applicants seemed to have adequate backgrounds and training. But early
dropouts occurred too frequently. Special tests had quite recently become
available and their use had now to be carefully evaluated. For two years
scholastic aptitude tests were given, and their results evaluated. These were
found to be indicative of information not previously available. At the end
of these two years the faculty accepted the Admission Committee's recom-
mendation that test scores be added to the other available pre-admission
criteria of student competence. Now our committee had a more complicated
task but the student results proved more rewarding.
The second urgent problem in the early 1920's resulted from the rapid
growth in available curricula. Whereas President David Starr Jordan had
from his wise and wide experience emphasized the human right of freedom
of choice, a system suited to the earlier limited possibilities had become
unwieldy. Now in its fourth decade the Stanford pendulum was swinging
away from complete freedom toward the recognition of certain basic essen-
tials. A required set of content courses now seemed to offer these essentials
whatever the student's major academic choice. These required courses were
assigned to the curriculum of the first two years. Some experimental courses
were developed. One called "Civilization" failed to catch on, whereas an-
other, "The History of Western Civilization" proved brilliant and popular.
As a member of the Committee on the Lower Division I learned much,
while most of all learning to know and value my fellow committeemen.
WALTER R. MILES 237

My third assignment gave me an opportunity to come in close contact

with faculty members in the biological sciences. This committee had the
responsibility of structuring a School of Biology. The usefulness of an intro-
ductory course in science was debated, accepted, and instituted with good
results. Our university colleagues at this time seemed to expect psychologists
to have special knowledge on all these subjects, an attitude of course chal-
lenging but also humbling. I enjoyed committee work, but important as it
was, my primary interest was in teaching students.
Early in the first years we began a study of the effect of loss of sleep
on mental work. Laslett carried this out to a Ph.D. thesis. With George Bran-
ner a problem was developed in the static equilibrium of pilots. Thomas
McQuarrie was working out his ingenious motor and mechanical ability test
series. Franklin Fearing worked on the factors influencing static equilibrium.
Ellen Sullivan did research on attitude in relation to learning, and there
were others.
From January 1922 to mid-1925 I was busily occupied with experimental
work with students, with my classes and lectures, and also with formal com-
mittees and family interests. My wife and children had adjusted happily to
the change in our environment and associations. The children liked the Cali-
fornia schools. We all enjoyed our new work and new friends. We were in
the midst of planning a pleasant house of our own on the Stanford campus
facing the foothills and near the Hoovers, the Termans, the Strongs, and
others of our congenial acquaintance.
In 1924 I had accepted an invitation to carry Professor George Strat-
ton's class work for the autumn semester at Berkeley. Our family expected
to move into the new house at the end of the summer, but our happy life
was suddenly ended by the death of my dear wife Elizabeth following nec-
essary surgery from which no such tragic result was anticipated. The chil-
dren and I passed through the sad summer and in the autumn we all went
to Berkeley where our friends generously helped us to re-establish our think-
ing and go on with life.
Berkeley has much charm to share with newcomers. The psychology
group at the University gave me excellent support. Seven mature gradu-
ate students (Katherine Adams, V. M. Bathgate, M. H. Elliott, Lloyd Jeffress,
D. A. Macfarlane, Otto L. Tinklepaugh, Robert C. Tryon) served as my
teaching assistants in the introductory psychology course that enrolled more
than 700 students. I lectured to the entire group two or three times each
week in Wheeler Hall. The class on other days was divided into sub-groups
of thirty each for demonstrations, discussions, and quizzes. As a teaching
team we tried hard to put psychology over to this assemblage. Stratton's
other classes I could manage by myself. The graduate students were con-
ducting studies on the learning behavior of animals. Here I had my first
opportunity to observe monkeys as experimental subjects. I recorded some
238 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

of this with my motion picture camera. I gained much from my contacts

with the Berkeley faculty and graduate student group and I was renewed and
enriched by their friendship.
Returning to begin the year at Stanford old friends stood by giving
aid and encouragement. Classes were resumed, faculty meetings were at-
tended, and I had to catch up with my University committees. Four gradu-
ate students got going on a study of handedness with some newly designed
motor tests. Miles A. Tinker began his fruitful research on eye movements
and fixations in reading mathematical and chemical formulae. K. W. Thomp-
son studied eye dominance in workers skilled in use of a single eyepiece
microscope. Frank Fearing continued his work on equilibrium with the ataxi-
ameter, adding a study on the human knee-jerk with excellent equipment
Dodge had designed. Eugene Shen working with several Chinese student
subjects was recording their eye movements and comparing their reading
speed for Chinese characters arranged in horizontal lines as compared with
the usual vertical display.
A young German, Heinrich Kluver, came to Stanford in 1924 and was
associated with me as a graduate student with Ph.D. intent. He was familiar
with German philosophical typology and in our laboratory undertook experi-
mentation with subjects found to be of eidetic type. This research was quite
successful and instructive to all of us. Here began another valued friendship
that has continued through the years.
Contact with some experimental work at Berkeley aroused my interest
in the maze as a useful instrument for the investigation of patterned space
learning. This suggested a psychological sector in which animal and human
learning might be compared. Enclosed mazes were of course traditional. In
fact a maze was defined as a complicated enclosure; however, open elevated
and high-relief forms could be easily designed and readily constructed. I
described several such arrangements in articles (1927b, 1927c) and showed
these mazes to my good friend Walter S. Hunter when he visited us at
Stanford. He took up the idea and went on to develop three-dimensional
mazes.
At Berkeley I had made an elevated narrow path maze for rat learning.
This was composed of interchangeable wooden frames. I wished now to com-
pare this type with an alley form of the same linear path scale. I could set
up this experiment in my garage at home, so as to spend more time with my
children. I needed a student assistant and advertised for one without ex-
plaining the type of work. The student who came was an English major.
At first I was doubtful. But I have never found a more careful and keen
associate. His name was Harry F. Harlow. Later in 1930 he completed his
work for the Ph.D. at Stanford guided by Professor Calvin P. Stone, my
able colleague in comparative psychology.
The Western Psychological Association was helping to stimulate re-
search ~t Stanford in these years. At the annual meetings, reports by our
WALTER R. MILES 239

students on experimental problems gave an opportunity for the presentation

of early research efforts allowing also critical discussions of the work. As
secretary of this Association I prepared and published in the Psychological
Bulletin reports of the third, fourth, and fifth meetings, 1924, 1925, and 1926.
In the summer of 1927 Professor Terman prevailed on Dr. Catharine M.
Cox, a former graduate student and associate, to leave Cincinnati where
she was working in the Central Mental Hygiene Clinic. His offer was par-
ticipation as Research Associate in an area of the gifted research. Our fam-
ily had known her for some years. This friendship developed and she and I
were married in September. My children warmly approved the marriage and
we remained as before a closely integrated family.
That autumn I had a number of studies in progress with graduate stu-
dents. A problem in eye movement research started with Laslett should have
been followed up. He and I photographed a reflected light beam from the
human cornea when the eye executed forty-degree horizontal movements
and then forty-degree vertical movements. The latter gave consistently shorter
tracings as if the center of rotation had changed. With Fearing studies of
periodic changes in mental and physical efficiency continued until he left
Stanford for Ohio Wesleyan. R. W. Husband was working on human learn-
ing with our four-section high-relief finger maze. Clarence Young's problem
involved the function of inner speech in reading and thought. B. Graves
worked with me on research still mentioned in athletic circles. In this study
we used a multiple chronograph on the football field for measuring the
charging time of each of the seven men in the line of players (1928a, 1928b,
1931a)' Maze learning in blind as compared with blindfolded seeing chil-
dren by J. R. Knotts was an interesting study (I929c). Further investiga-
tions by Chinese students, notably S. K. Chow, enlarged our understanding
of the reading of Chinese. Dr. Robert Seashore, eldest son of Dean Seashore,
as an N.R.C. Fellow, worked with us at Stanford for a year and developed
the Seashore Motor Skills Battery of tests. Hugh Bell made with me a pre-
liminary investigation of the eye movements of university students engaged
in study. The results gave a practical indication of the effectiveness of the
students when at work. For Homer Weaver's research, the large eye-move-
ment camera was located on top of a grand piano to record the eye-move-
ment patterns in reading the music while playing it on the instrument. It
was a valuable study and the first of its kind.
Studies of color-blindness were popular at this time. Sybil Walcutt
made a carefully arranged attempt to grade and classify types of defect.
E. Lowell Kelly was attracted to the problem of producing chromaesthesia
artificially by a conditioned response technique. About this time L. P. Her-
rington, later for many years with Professor Winslow in the Pierce Labora-
tory at Yale, produced a careful research on the physiological psychology of
college student introverts and extraverts.
Time, fatigue, and work studies had become popular in industry. Ques-
240 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tions as to the older workers' competence and the problem of retirement

were being debated. Scattered studies of the abilities and interests of middle-
aged workers were appearing. We had done some studies involving capacities
and abilities of adults under certain conditions. Industrialists as well as psy-
chologists were asking about these and related questions: Could we at Stan-
ford plan a research program for the study of the adult that might balance
to some extent the great Terman research on the early growth period? Into
a study of the later years it seemed we might fit many various researches
of psychophysiological skills, intelligence, interests, even personalities.
Looking back now one sees the rapid development in problems of this
area going on throughout our country and in Europe. But in the 1920's
the research field was relatively new. Terman, Strong, Stone, and I were all
involved in working out a plan. Strong would set up his vocational studies;
Stone would work on aging in rats with excellent controls; I was delegated
to carry out the details of laboratory housing, securing the needed age range
of human subjects, and the general supervision of the work of the graduate
students who enlisted in the project. We presented our detailed program
to the Carnegie Corporation of New York and were rewarded by a grant
of $10,000, and so the Stanford Later Maturity Study began. Graduate stu-
dents were attracted to this research opportunity and the detailed planning
of the first group of studies was undertaken with enthusiasm.
Problems of where and with whom were now before us and as our
thinking and searching continued we came to see how the success of the
project would depend on the rightness of some of our initial efforts. At once
a research center must be established easily accessible to the people of the
community. Also it seemed desirable to disassociate the project from the Uni-
versity psychology department.
This research program served as I had hoped as a framework for major
graduate studies. The principal programs of experimental work were carried
out in March to August 1930 and, supported by a second Carnegie grant,
in April to June 1932. My wife assisted in working with our subjects in
both studies.
A new problem developed as we tried advertising and other ways of
soliciting individuals as subjects. Employment agencies were not successful
as helpers in this respect. At length a scheme was devised of inviting social
clubs and philanthropic organizations of all kinds to send us their members
and friends, the club or organization, not the individual, receiving payment
for the time and effort given. Since it was essential for our research to secure
as many subjects as possible in the older age decades, payment was calcu-
lated on the age of each individual subject. This scheme proved successful
in bringing out relatively large numbers in the decades from forty onward
and even past sixty and seventy. The clubs were delighted with this novel
means of raising funds. Individuals who had previously declined our invita-
WALTER R. MILES 241

tion to participate now gladly came and brought others. The result was high
motivation and I believe near maximum effort.
Our first Ph.D. thesis result of the Later Maturity Program was an
excellent study completed by Floyd L. Ruch in which he compared the
performance of three age groups (forty subjects in each group), including
one of teen-agers, a second of middle age (thirty-five to fifty-eight) and one
of older people (sixty to eighty-one). Ruch used tasks of motor and verbal
learning requiring different levels of reorganization of partial patterns pre-
viously learned. In the young group individual competence increased with
age, in the middle and older groups decrement occurred. The more complex
the learning requirement, the more noteworthy was the contrast between
the learning of young and older subjects.
Other doctoral theses followed: Roger G. Barker, on muscular work
abilities of the hands; Bronson Price, on immediate verbal memory; and
Charles Marsh, Jr., who used a series of seven tests including a Dearborn
form board, the Healey picture completion test No. II, and Porteus mazes.
Albert Walton studied motor abilities in athletes using Stanford students for
his younger group and older men from the Athletic Club of San Francisco.
Paul Butterworth made a comprehensive study of the relation of age to
skill in expert chess players. Keith Sward did a postdoctoral study of various
abilities in younger and older college professors matched for professional
fields.
Three tests of practical or occupational competence and two tests of
intelligence completed the Later Maturity test battery. A sex difference ap-
peared where the experience of men and women is radically diverse. On the
McFarlane Coat assembly test, where in terms of norms the women excelled
the men in speed in every decade, a group of male tailors indicated their
special occupational skill by exceeding the mean score for the women (1931 b,
1931c, 1931d, with C. C. Miles, 1932b).
Over 2000 individuals worked diligently on a time-limited Otis Group
test. The results showed the typical age decrement, the downward curves
from decade to decade. Men and women of equal education scored equally
with similar test material. When a similar Otis test was administered with
unlimited time allowance, the age decline was lessened.
In summary, the Stanford Maturity Studies gave a broad working basis
for later investigators. Our large and representative samples of subjects in
each decade from the twenties to the nineties, while they brought out no de-
cisively new or startling results, did show with emphasis the persisting trend
of age decline in whatever aspects of activity whether mental, sensory, or
motor. Sex similarity of achievement and decline in intelligence was dem-
onstrated as was sex difference in tasks of every kind where the experience
and training of men and women characteristically differ. Age decline was
the persisting conclusion.
242 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

N ow thirty years later we know how age and aging studies have con-
tinued to be of wide scientific interest. But when Cowdry brought to-
gether the material for his first volume of studies of aging, he included my
report as representative in the psychological area. This was in 1939. Since
then the field has enlarged and the researches have proliferated. In the 1930's
Wechsler credited our results with suggesting to him the desirability of a
sliding scale of intelligence quotients for older people. Lorge, Shock, and
many others with present day compendia by Birren have shown what can
be done and is still to be done in the psychology of aging.
We left Stanford after completing the second Later Maturity Study
series in 1932. The data had been gathered and some of the reports were
in. We were sorry to leave California and our many good friends at Stan-
ford. There was much to remember in the stimulating comradeship of those
years and we were grateful. Our three older children attended and gradu-
ated from Stanford. A brief halt was made after our drive to New Haven
in the company of our daughter Marjorie and our new daughter, Anna
Mary, who was not quite three years old. Then we were off for an ocean
voyage and rest with relatives in England. I attended and took part in the
Centenary Celebration of the British Medical Society. The International
Congress of Psychology then drew us to Copenhagen where Professor and
Mrs. August Krogh were our kind hosts. That Congress brought together
good friends and scientists: Pavlov, Niels Bohr, Cattell, Margaret Wash-
burn, and many others. The return voyage to New York and a quick journey
by car found us in Ithaca for the fortieth Annual Meeting of the APA. As
president for that occasion I read my paper on "Age and Human Ability,"
which was duly published in the Psychological Review (1933).
How had our transfer to Yale corne about? The plan for the later ma-
turity research had been in the making when in 1929 I attended the Inter-
national Congress of Psychology in New Haven. For me that Congress
represented a high point of scientific and personal experience. Pavlov was
present and we were able to communicate with him through his interpreter.
Dodge had arranged symposia on vision including some of our eye-move-
ment recordings and he had included me as one of the speakers. In addi-
tion, I appeared on two other programs.
The talk in New Haven, especially among the Yale group, was of
President Angell's achievements for the University and especially his new-
est plan for the Institute of Human Relations. Months later, after my return
to Stanford, with considerable correspondence intervening, Professor Dodge
carne out West to use his persuasive powers to bring us into the Institute.
I will not attempt to trace or outline the discussions. A memorandum, a
brief statement of the President's plan brings together what had already
been accomplished by the Psychology Institute and Dr. Ruggles' work in the
University. It seemed to reach a climax in Dean Winternitz's ambition for
medicine in the future. The ideas formulated in these statements were dis-
WALTER R. MILES 243

cussed again and again from every angle. In the end I agreed to go to New
Haven during my Sabbatical leave the following year. This I did. Then we
returned for one last year at Stanford and in 1932 transferred finally and
definitely to Yale. The points of view and aspirations expressed in the
"Memorandum on the Institute" had largely influenced me in my decision.
The Institute of Human Relations at Yale was an early enterprise of
President Angell who as psychologist had seen and entered into the expan-
sion of that science at Chicago and later at Yale. He believed that psychol-
ogists working closely with men in related fields could advance knowledge
through an integrated attack. He envisaged a definite but flexible organi-
zation that would bring together scholars from sociology, anthropology,
pedagogy, psychology, and medical science, especially psychiatry. His think-
ing developed in the atmosphere and with the enthusiasm engendered by
the possibilities of combining three excellent existing sources and building
further upon them.
The previous Institute of Psychology at Yale, which had engaged the
efforts of Dodge, Yerkes, and Wissler, had demonstrated its success. Dr.
Arthur Ruggles, Professor of Psychiatry, had developed since 1925 an un-
usual and effective mental hygiene program in the University student health
department. Dean Milton Winternitz had brought the zeal and vigor of
Johns Hopkins to an expanding medical school at Yale, in Simon Flexner's
opinion "the most promising institution of its kind in the country." Dean
Winternitz was directing effort and planning beyond the already achieved
level of standard efficiency in the hospital and in the medical school. He
believed that existing medical skills and knowledge were ready to achieve
a leap forward, specifically in the prevention of illness and in the promotion
of good health. He championed the view that psychiatry was important in
all clinical teaching. The purpose of the Institute of Human Relations was
to provide teams of medical and other related scientific specialists who could
coordinate researches designed to gain the broadest possible understanding
of human beings as socially functioning individuals. The importance of
studying normal persons was specifically urged.
There were also those outside Yale who approved the announced ob-
jective of the Institute. Dr. Adolph Meyer, a warm supporter of "common-
sense" in psychiatry, believed the Institute plan could be realized in fact.
He organized a symposium on the material of human nature and conduct.
I was included along with Malamud, Rado, Cobb, Whitehorn, Bender, and
Meyer who linked the presentations and emphasized the common ground.
A reviewer concluded, "The result is a kinship of material and methods
characteristic of trained pluralistic but consistently objective common sense
of today free of the residuals of animistic tradition and without the dog-
matism of the traditional types of the superscientific materialism of the 18th
and 19th centuries. The material of human nature and conduct is equally
open to the contributions from the basic sciences and from the cultural
244 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

sciences dealing with man and is a domain calling for its own specific status
and cultivation. The Symposium ... presents a panorama that is both
factually and in perspective a practical attainment of the goal and an en-
couragement for a growing shaping of a plastic and fertile consensus." Here
was the goal, and I believe that the striving toward it was not all in vain.
Dr. Eugene Kahn, a student of Kraepelin, had been brought from
Munich as head of the Department of Psychiatry and Sterling Professor of
Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene at Yale. Dr. Kahn was now in charge of
the clinic and the clinic patients who made up the two groups of individuals
for possible study in the Institute. Dr. Kahn proved to be a skillful diag-
nostician and we thought him a good teacher. He and Professor Dodge were
closely associated and en joyed philosophical discussions of personality prob-
lems.
In my laboratory I set up equipment for conducting research in metabo-
lism, relaxation, respiration, and sensory perception combined with interview
type studies. Dr. Kahn approved my program and invited my participation
in the psychiatric staff meetings and also in the daily staff rounds which
served as an essential part of his teaching plan. Our laboratory studies were
offered to all available and more or less cooperative patients. My wife made
clinical tests and observations of personality types and behavior reactions.
We reported our findings to staff conferences.
Conferences with Dodge were always a pleasure and we carried on con-
tinuing studies and discussions in which our assistant Neal Miller often
took part. Miller, previously my assistant at Stanford, had accompanied me
in the transfer to Yale. Dodge and I were interested in his plan to go to
Vienna for a didactic psychoanalysis, as a basis for later more exact study
of certain concepts. After Vienna, Miller returned to Yale where he has
continued his work. His friendship has meant much to me through the years.
Until 1935-36 the Institute of Human Relations program proceeded about
as originally planned. Interest in the Institute was general and for a time
many visitors claimed attention. The routine of psychiatric conferences and
interviews became increasingly demanding. There were always interested
students. The psychiatric interns referred many of their patients to our serv-
ice, wanted full written reports on them, and would corne to discuss the
cases. Outpatient clinic patients were referred more and more often as local
agencies became aware of the available service.
I found special interest in referrals of unusual types-a Korsakof, a case
of Pick's disease, and several cases of psychic or so-called hysterical damage.
Amnesias and aphasics turned up. The neuro-surgeons were interested in
frontal lobe problems at this time.
Dr. Clements Fry, psychiatrist in the University health department, set
up a regular psychological program for selected clinical studies of university
students under his care. And the School of Nursing made referrals and re-
quested a testing program of entering students.
WALTER R. MILES 245

In the middle 1930's a State Commission on Jails with some Federal

funds available for employing out-of-work personnel made a survey of the
jail population of Connecticut. The Institute of Human Relations cooperated
in this project by furnishing space for offices and also by making available
psychiatric and psychological specialists to test and evaluate the jail popu-
lation. My wife and I, using our car, took part in this project and had the
assistance of four clinical psychologists. We spent a day or more at each
jail gathering data. Group tests were made of some 800 men and individual
studies were made of 503 persons. Appraisals of such traits as cooperation,
adaptability, persistence, intelligence, and emotionality were made on the
basis of our tests and observations. In addition social and personal data were
gathered by welfare workers. The results of this survey were used by the
Connecticut Legislative Commission on Jails in their planning and recom-
mendations especially with respect to rehabilitation.
In 1935 Dr. Winternitz ended his fifteen years as Dean of the Yale
Medical School and with this change in administration the originally planned
program for the Institute was given up as practically impossible of realization.
Professor Mark l\1ay now became director of the Institute of which he had
previously been secretary and his keen insight and practicality were seen in
the ensuing developments. As these were ultimately realized, they salvaged
what at that time could be utilized from the original plan. According to the
new plan a staff of senior professors was selected from the several disciplines
already represented in the Institute and conducting research in the field of
behavioral studies. I was included in this group. Our responsibility was the
general planning for the work of young men in pre- or postdoctoral interne-
ship. Dr. John B. Wolfe was one of these postdoctoral students, the first
assigned to me. He came with an N.R.C. fellowship. I continued my re-
lationship with the psychiatry department although with a difference, and
other activities developed. In the psychology department I now took a some-
what more active part. I was already a member of the graduate school faculty
and now served on its committees. Graduate students consulted me more
frequently. In the medical school I came to have charge of the Neurological
Study Unit, an important teaching clinic which met weekly and required
continuous planning.
From 1939 to 1944 World War II called for total support from science
and OUf activities. Yale men were deeply involved. The undergraduates in
eight of the ten colleges were in uniform. Committee work and voluntary
aid as called for by government agencies were the order of the day. National
Research Council committees now had special goals for wartime research
and planning. Under the Office of Scientific Research and Development
my heaviest and most prolonged duty was with the Committee on Aviation
Medicine of which Dr. Eugene F. DuBois, a Naval Reserve Captain, was
chairman. We were meeting, supervising government contracts, organizing
conferences, or traveling on inspections much of the time, and served from
246 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

November 12, 1940 to June 30, 1946. In 1940 and throughout the war pe-
riod I worked on problems of vision involved in current needs and was at
the New London Submarine Base from time to time (with Carson and
Stevens, 1943c; 1943d; 1943e; 1945b; with D. W. Bronk, 1948). Dark
adaptation was an important problem for research. I had excellent equip-
ment in my laboratory at Yale and alert young men to serve as observers.
I became aware that the presence of a red light in the dark room did not
much influence the rate and resulting level of dark adaptation. I made up
some dozens of pairs of red goggles and sent them to different U.S. military
stations for trial. The military found them effective aids in preparation for
night seeing. They were introduced in Great Britain and elsewhere and
were not patented.
In 1942 I was sent to England to serve as consultant on Hying stress
in the Royal Air Force. Here I served with or under the director general
of medical services, Dr. Whittingham. I shared an office in the U.S. Em-
bassy in London and had for several months a wide opportunity to consult
with British scientists and to relay to Washington such information as seemed
desirable at that time. On returning home I had much to do in reporting
and in catching up with the work of committees from whose membership I
had been absent. One or two new ones were started. During the war I was
in and out of Yale but when it was over, I carne back, with gladness in my
heart. It was wonderful to talk with graduate students again about science
for science's sake. My capable laboratory assistant Alphonse Chapanis had
finished his doctoral requirements in 1943. His ability and training later
made him valuable at Wright Field, in the laboratory concerned with visibil-
ity and optics in connection with aviation. Again after the war I established
contact with most of the graduate students in psychology and they all knew
they could come to talk to me if they so desired. With some of them I talked
about the possibility of doing research at Orange Park at the chimpanzee col-
ony established there by Professor Robert M. Yerkes. For some time I was
secretary of a Yale committee that had to do with the continuation of this
research opportunity.
At Yale I was not responsible for as many Ph.D. theses as at Stanford
but I had some contact with a large number of graduate scholars and had
with many of them stimulating discussions. Among these I think of Merideth
Crawford, James and Eleanor Gibson, Robert Malmo, Austin Rieson, Robert
Ross and his friend Lloyd Embry who painted Professor Raymond Dodge's
portrait, Richard Rouse, Robert and Pauline Sears, Lillian Wolfe, Jane B.
Birge, Marion Rowe, Shirley Spragg, and Wallace Wulfeck. Dr. Lloyd Beck
and I started some research on olfaction which resulted in my making a field
study on honeybees (with L. H. Beck, 1949a). This problem still inter-
ests me.
With the founding of the residential colleges a new phase of academic
life came into being at Yale. Under President Angell and made possible by
WALTER R. MILES 247
gifts of Edward S. Harkness, ten colleges were established in order to recover
the social and educational values of small groups in what had become a large
university. Each college had its resident Master and a group of Fellows at
first selected from teachers of the undergraduates. Before the end of the
1930's a few professors from the Graduate School were added to college
groups. I had the honor of being chosen as a Fellow of Jonathan Edwards
College. The Master, Robert Dudley French, and his wife Margaret became
our valued friends. The Fellowship of the College built on the Oxford pat-
tern has contributed a very special and precious aspect to the life at Yale.
For several years I had the honor of being president of Jonathan Edwards
Senior Common Room. The Fellowship continues now long after my retire-
ment and means much to me.
In 1953, I reached the Yale automatic retirement age. Visits to relatives
and a sojourn at our small farm in Otsego County, New York, followed. Then
quite unexpectedly early in 1954 came an invitation from Professor Miimtaz
Turhan, head of the Department of Psychology at the Turkish University in
Istanbul, to join their faculty group. We knew little of the conditions for
living and working in Turkey but decided to accept.
Moving to Turkey for an uncertain period made it necessary to resign
from positions I had enjoyed for several years. As chairman of the Board of
Examiners for Connecticut Certified Psychologists I had with others enjoyed
working with Dr. Marion A. Bills who knew the law and most of the candi-
dates who wished to qualify. I had been chairman of the Board of Directors
of The Psychological Corporation of New York for ten years. They gave me
a gold watch which I wear. It had been a pleasure to work with President Dr.
George K. Bennett in this forward looking organization founded by my good
friend Cattell. I had been chairman, Board of Directors, for the American
Institute for Research, Pittsburg, since it was founded by its very capable
Dr. John C. Flanagan. I continue to be interested in these and similar organi-
zations that apply tested psychological facts and principles in the accomplish-
ment of human needs.
We encountered in Turkey three years of fascinating and rewarding
oriental life and the experience of contact with Turkish teachers, scholars,
and students modern in their thinking while holding fast to the historical
culture from which their young nation had emerged. At the University all
professors were under the Turkish civil service. Permission to leave the city
for a month or more must be obtained. It was readily granted us for the pur-
pose of visiting universities of Southern Europe in the summer of 1955. The
following summer we remained in Turkey visiting many historical and inter-
esting sites. In 1957 we again went abroad, finally attending the International
Congress of Psychology in Brussels.
At the University there were a few professors from Germany, France,
and England, as well as the great majority who were Turkish. Each non-
Turkish professor lectured in his own language which was then translated
248 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

one paragraph at a time by a Turkish assistant. The result, an opportunity

for the students to learn or increase their learning of the foreign language
while imbibing what they can of the subject matter of the lecture. I used
material presented on charts prepared at home and also slides and motion
picture reels as illustrative devices.
My assistant, Beglan Birand, was an able Istanbul Ph.D. who had spent
a profitable year at Stanford University as a Fulbright scholar. I had not met
her before we went to Turkey. As a result of outstanding achievements in
her examinations she was awarded at Istanbul the rank of Docent in 1957.
Another able student was Halide Yavuz who after my first year in Istanbul
came to the United States and graduated Ph.D. at Connecticut University;
her fields were experimental and clinical. A group of students too numerous
to name individually became and remain our friends.
In the three years we learned to know and admire Turkish art and archi-
tecture and also came in contact with Byzantine, Greek, and even Hittite
remains of enormous interest.
Shortly before we left Istanbul a suggestion reached me that I should
become scientific director at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base Medical Re-
search Laboratory of New London, Connecticut. Commander Dean Farns-
worth and Captain Joseph Vogel encouraged me to accept. The former was
a long-time friend and fellow worker on Navy problems of vision; the latter
was the officer-in-charge at the Laboratory.
My earlier experiences with the scientific staff at the sub base and
knowledge of the work done there inclined me to the suggestion. And so we
carne to our beloved Connecticut again and located in Gales Ferry about
three miles from the north gate of the submarine base. The focus of the re-
search work in this laboratory is directed toward achieving results of benefit
to the health, motivation, and effective service of the submariners. The atomic
submarines capable of long periods of submergence have posed many new
questions that demand research. And now there is a new and long-range
problem before us. It is that of man living, exploring, and working in and
from undersea dwellings on the continental shelf. Under the stimulating and
far-sighted leadership of Captain George F. Bond, M.C., U.S.N., recently
our officer-in-charge, this Laboratory, belonging to the Bureau of Medicine
and Surgery, has through a long series of researches with animals and men
developed and tested scientific information pertinent to this objective. A trial
run with four men, all experienced divers, living in a "sea-house" on the
sea bottom 192 feet down near the Argus Tower, was successfully carried
out for nearly two weeks in late summer 1964. This complicated experiment
came to have the name Sealab 1. And now as I write these lines elaborate
plans are far advanced for Sealab II to be located on the Pacific Coast in
deeper colder water and involving more men and a wider spectrum of scien-
tific data and planned undersea accomplishments.
In the psychophysiological research of the Navy there are many chal-
WALTER R. MILES 249

lenging possibilities and new problems especially in the opening areas in-
volved in oceanography. I am happy to have shared in the developing insights
and to have served with the able scientific groups engaged in the several
programs of the research.
The joy of being a living creature is multiplied by there being others
somewhat like one's self and by having or sharing children who develop into
useful adults and who likewise have children. And there is enjoyment in
associating with other life forms with which nature surrounds us. We may
touch them and in memory recall their charms. I like to recall bringing the
dozen little redwood trees down the mountain and planting them in a circle
behind our home on Gerona Road at Stanford. When last we saw them some
were more than sixty feet tall; they could cast a shadow ten times as long as
a man's shadow. Perhaps if they escape man's tree cutting desires one of
them may be living there a thousand years hence. To plant ideas or to plant
trees? I have enjoyed trying to do a bit of both.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Walter R. Miles
A comparison of elementary and high school grades. Pedag. Sem., 1910, 17, 429-
450.
Accuracy of the voice in simple pitch singing. Psychol. Rev. Monogr., 1914, 16,
No. 69.
Some psycho-physiological processes as affected by alcohol. Proc. nat. Acad. Sci.,
1916,2,703-709.
Effect of alcohol on psycho-physiological functions. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie
Institution, 1918, No. 286. (a)
The effect of a prolonged reduced diet on twenty-live college men. Proc. nat.
Acad. Sci., 1918, 4, 152-156. (b)
The sex expression of men living on a lowered nutritional level. J. nerv, Ment. Dis.,
1919,49,208-224. (a)
(with F. C. Benedict, P. Roth, & H. W. Smith) Human vitality and efficiency
under prolonged restricted diet. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1919.
(b)
A pursuit pendulum. Psychol. Rev., 1920,27, 361-376.
A pursuit-meter. ]. expo Psychol., 1921, 4, 77-105.
Static equilibrium as a useful test of motor control. J. Industr. Hyg., 1922, 3,
316-331. Ca)
The comparative concentrations of alcohol in human blood and urine at intervals
after ingestion. l- pharm. expo Therapeut., 1922, 20, 265-285. (b)
(with H. F. Root) Physical measurements of diabetic patients. J. Metahol. Res.,
1922,2, 173-197.
Alcohol and human efficiency. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1924,
No. 333.
250 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(with H. F. Root) Physical measurements on operated hyperthyroids. Proc. Soc.

expo BioI. Med., 1926, 23, 727-728.
Rapid weight changes reflected in physical measurements on adults. Arch. into
Med., 1927, 39,605-617. (a)
The two-story duplicate maze. ]. expo Psychol., 1927, 10, 365-377. (b)
The narrow-path elevated maze for studying rats. Proc. Soc. expo BioI. Med., 1927,
24, 454-456. (c)
Studies of physical exertion: 1. A multiple chronograph for measuring groups of
men. Amer. ]. physical Educ., 1928, 33, 379-387. (a)
The measurement of speed in football-charging. Scientifoc American, March 1928,
226-229. (b)
British scientific instruments. Psycho!. BulL, 1928, 25, 480-486. (c)
Human body-weight: 1. Correlation between body widths and other physical meas-
urements on young men. Science, N.S., 1928, 68, 382-386. Cd)
Visual illusions of motion. Sci. Mon., 1928, 27, 481-491. (e)
Horizontal eye movements at the onset of sleep. Psychol. Rev., 1929, 36, 122-
141. (a)
Duration of sleep and the insensible perspiration. Proc. Soc. expo BioI. Med., 1929,
26, 577-580. (b)
(with Knotts) The maze learning ability of blind compared with sighted children.
]. genet. Psychol., 1929,36,21-50. (c)
One hundred cases of color blindness detected with the Ishihara test. }. genet.
Psycho!., 1929, 2, 535-543. Cd)
Individuality in heart-rate response to work and rest. Psychol. Bull., 1929, 26,
594-595. (e)
Ocular dominance in adults. J. genet. Psychol., 1930, 3, 412-430.
Studies in physical exertion: II. Individual and group reaction time in football-
charging. Res. quart., 1931,2,5-13. Ca)
Change of dexterity with age. Proc. Soc. expo BioI. Med., 1931,29, 136-138. (b)
Measures of certain human abilities throughout the life span. Proc. nat. Acad.
Sci., 1931, 17, 627-633. (c)
Correlation of reaction and coordination speed with age in adults. Amer. }. Psy-
chol., 1931, 43, 377-391. (d)
The normal sensitivity of the cardia-inhibitory center. J. Industr. Hyg., 1932, 14,
3-17. (a)
(with C. C. Miles) The correlation of intelligence scores and chronological age
from early to late maturity. Amer. }. Psychol., 1932, 44, 44-78. (b)
Age and human ability. Psychol. Rev., 1933, 40, 99-123.
A metabolic study of three unusual learned breathing patterns practiced in the
cult of Yoga. Amer. J. Physiol., 1934, 109,75.
Training, practice and mental longevity. Science, 1935, 81, 79-87. (a)
Age and human society. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A handbook of social psychology.
Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univer. Press, 1935, 596-682. (b)
(Ed. and contrib.) Psychological studies of human variability. Psychol. Monogr.,
1936 (Whole No. 212). (a)
The reaction time of the eye. Psychol. Monogr., 1936,47, No. 212, 268-293. (b)
Changes in respiratory pattern associated with different types of vocalization.
Science, 1937, 85, 444. (a)
WALTER R. MILES 251

Psychological factors in alcoholism. Ment. Hyg., 1937, 21, 529-548. (b)

Mental performance with bilateral frontal area defect. Proc. Int. Congr. Psychol.,
1938, 413.
Psychological aspects of ageing. In E. V. Cowdry (Ed.), Problems of ageing.
Baltimore, 1939, 535-571. (a)
Performance of the Einthoven galvanometer with input through a vacuum tube
microvoltrneter. ]. Exp. Psychol., 1939,25, 76-90. (b)
Reliability of measurements of the steady polarity potential of the eye. Proc. nat.
Acad. Sci., 1939,25, 128-136. (c)
The ocular polarity potential in cases with unilateral enucleation. Proc. nat. Acad.
Sci., 1939, 25, 349-358. (d)
The steady polarity potential of the human eye. Proc. nat. Acad. Sci., 1939, 25,
25-36. (e)
Modification of the human eye potential by dark and light adaptation. Science,
1940,91,456.
The development of psychology. In L. L. Woodruff (Ed.), Development of the
sciences. New Haven, Conn.: Yale, 1941,247-290. (a)
Coordination of psychological services in the national emergency. ]. consult. Psy-
choZ., 1941, 5, 216-220. (b)
(with C. C. l\1iles) Psychological changes in normal ageing. In E. C. Stieglitz
(Ed.), Geriatric medicine. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1943, 99-117. (a)
Contributions to "Psychology for the fighting man," E. C. Boring and M. Van
de Water (Ed.), The infantry]., Washington, D.C., 1943. (b)
(with Carson and Stevens) Vision, hearing and aeronautical design. Sci. Mo.,
1943, 56, 446-451. (c)
Night vision: light sensitivity vs. form acuity. Yale Sci. Mag., 1943, lB, 10-11,
28, 30. (d)
Red goggles for producing dark adaptation. Proc. Fed. Amer. Sci. expo BioI., 1943,
2, 109-11 5. (e)
Psychological aspects of military aviation. American Scientist, 1945, 33, 146-
158. (a)
Entoptic plotting of the macular area. Army-Navy OSRD, vision Com. Proc., 14th
meeting, 1945, 15-28. (b)
(with D. W. Bronk) Visual problems. In Advances in military medicine. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1948, 261-277.
(with L. H. Beck) Infra-red absorption in field studies of olfaction in honeybees.
Proc. nat. Acad. Sci., 1949,35, 292-310. (a)
On the central zone of the human fovea. Science, 1949, 109, 441-442. (b)
Selected psychomotor measurement methods, Sec. III. In R. W. Gerard (Ed.),
Methods in medical research, vol. III. Chicago: The Year Book Medical Pub-
lishers, 1950, 142-218.
Methods of using binoculars. Army-Navy NRC vision Com. Proc., 29th meeting,
1951,63-89.
Effectiveness of red light on dark adaptation. ]. opt. Soc. Amer., 1953, 43, 435-
441. (a)
Light sensitivity and form perception in dark adaptation. ]. opt. Soc. Amer., 1953,
43, 560-566. (b)
(with B. M. Shriver) Ageing in Air Force pilots.}. Geront., 1953,8, 185-190. (c)
252 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Comparison of functional and structural areas in the human fovea, 1. Method of

entoptic plotting. ]. Neurophysiol., 1954, 17, 22-38.
(Ed. and contributor) Istanbul studies in experimental psychology, Vol. I, Istanbul,
Turkey: Istanbul Univer., 1956. (a)
Comparison of simultaneous tests of right and left hand grip with separate succes-
sive tests. Istanbul Stud. expo Psycho1., 1956, 1, XX, 22-32. (b)
(with Beglan Birand) Lightness of some surface colors compared for stereo-kinetik
depth effects. Istanbul Stud. expo Psychol., 1956, 1, 86-103. (c)
Improvement of judgments for small horizontal distances. Istanbul Stud. expo
Psychol., 1956, 1, 122-143. Cd)

Other Publications Cited

James, William. Psychology, briefer course. New York: Holt, 1892.

Pillsbury, W. B. Essentials of psychology. New York: Macmillan, 1911.
253
Gardner Murphy
Over the years my classes have heard about the predicament of a small
boy who lived in a New England town, and encountered some problems in
getting himself sorted out in terms of "identity." The town was Concord,
Massachusetts, and the years were at the beginning of this century. In the
sketch, drawn on many blackboards, the Boston and Maine railroad tracks
are indicated. On one side lived people who were of Anglo-Saxon derivation,
business class membership, Protestant faith; in general, they were commuters
to Boston. On the other side of the tracks, known in the vernacular as "Texas,"
lived people who were of Irish extraction, worked with their hands, were of
Roman Catholic faith, and did not commute. The problem of the small boy
in question arose from the fact that he belonged to the majority group on the
"good" side of the tracks, but his name placed him spang in the middle of
"Texas." This problem of divided loyalties, and uncertain identity, has been
with me for a lifetime. It goes with the fact that when we moved from the
North for a short time, to Montgomery, Alabama, the boys across the street
asked what language we spoke. It appeared again when it became evident,
as we moved North again, that my father was not only of remote Irish extrac-
tion, but was a Southerner and a Democrat.
Mavericks and minorities were "my kind" of people. I vividly remember
an episode in Kerrville, Texas, where my uncle had taken us to share his
hunting trip. It involved a huge, floppy-eared, otherwise nondescript brown
dog who was very hungry. Nobody would feed him. Everybody knew that
stray dogs would attach themselves to you if you fed them. I asked my mother
if I could have my weekly allowance, consisting of a dime, and when the dog
had followed us all the way back to San Antonio, I paid my cousin the dime
to buy a big plate full of rations for the brown dog. This business of being
"for the underdog" was deeply ingrained very early, and burrowed deeply in.
I am sure it had a little to do with my being minority-groupish myself. It had
something to do also with being admired for being generous, and enjoyed
various other "operant" attributes. For whatever reasons one may assign, it has
not extinguished. It has in fact been reinforced by a good many fairly obvious
social factors, not necessarily or always very lovable.
After two and a half years in Montgomery, Alabama, where my father,

255
256 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Edgar Gardner Murphy, was rector of an Episcopal church, and a year in San
Antonio, Texas, the family came North. There was Concord, where my
mother, Maud King, second of three sisters who were daughters of old New
England stock, had herself grown up before she went off to Vassar and thence
on to the South, teaching, and meeting my father. Concord was always the
home base and rallying point, with my extraordinarily loving and companion-
able Cran'pa and Gran'ma King, and with aunts, uncles, cousins, who gave
me a very intense feeling of really belonging. Indeed, belonging just as much
as if my father had not come from San Antonio, and the University of the
South. It was as if my life were a pure culture of the Emerson, Thoreau,
Alcott world in which we were steeped. We soaked in Gran'pa King's con-
tinuous and exquisite quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible, and miscel-
laneous English literature, often slyly and adroitly adapted to capricious pur-
poses. (When lunch was late, he asked if there was a "Distant Prospect of
Eton," and when the melon was green, he suggested letting it wait over,
"making the green one red.") With Gran'ma King, in her gentle, steady
Stoicism, I identified to the same full degree.
After two and a half years in Concord we moved to Branford, Connecti-
cut, so that my father, founder of the National Child Labor Committee, who
was traveling in the interests of education in the South, could more easily
run up from New York and see us. His health was deteriorating with a heart
condition, and after several terrible sieges in Branford, and in New Haven,
where we moved in 1905, he became a semi-invalid, struggling on through
much writing on issues-Southern and national-to make a considerable dent
in American public opinion on education, race relations, and other themes.
Those years in New Haven, 1905 to 1910, were years of intense curiosity
and intellectual development, with a passion for religious clarification, as I
became what my elder brother, DuBose, later called an "evangelical Catholic";
that is, within the Anglican fold, but both evangelical and historically oriented.
I went off to Hotchkiss School, 1910 to 1912. Here I was somewhat isolated
and intensely concerned about intellectual and religious matters, and was
absorbed in my studies, particularly Greek, Latin, and English. In 1912 I
entered Yale and went on with a narrow and intense scholarly preoccupation.
My father, devotedly struggling to understand me, and to help me, and pour-
ing out an affection which I reciprocated, died in 1913. My mother, always
dose to me, drew even closer, and remained a profound and sustaining force
through all my later years-at college, in professional training, and during
the years of my marriage and parenthood-living to the age of 92 and to the
end vigorously sharing our intellectual efforts and our joy in our children.
With the aid of family savings and scholarships, I was able to continue
at college and to graduate in 1916. My closest friends during that period were
those destined for the ministry. My interest in psychology was intense, and
as told in another narrative (1957), it was in considerable measure what I
had known about psychical research, as conveyed to me by Gran'pa King and
GARDNER MURPHY 257

my father, that made me feel that there was a vital challenge here. The psy-
chology at Yale was not then very strong, but I responded strongly to it, and
much more to the very extraordinary anthropology taught me by Albert G.
Keller. He presented a vivid, dramatic, Darwinian evolutionary viewpoint,
which I telescoped into a broad social science point of view, with a good deal
of economic, linguistic, and political material which I found enormously
gratifying. My general world outlook took shape rapidly during this junior
year at Yale, and there came about an erosion of my religious beliefs, which
were to be assaulted more rapidly in the following two years. My primary
extracurricular activity was the debating team-in itself very gratifying, and
certainly the most important single factor in training me for public speaking,
and for the delights of the teaching craft. John Chester Adams, who coached
the debating team, and who taught me sophomore English, was the greatest
inlluence in my college years, and to him ran second Chauncy Brewster
Tinker, with whom I had both freshman English and in my senior year the
"Age of Johnson." One other vital course for me was zoology, magnificently
taught.
With the major in psychology and the minor in anthropology it became
clear to me where I was going. I was admitted to the Harvard graduate school
in September of 1916, working with Yerkes, M iinsterberg, Langfeld, Holt,
and Troland-all good courses, but none brilliant. Troland, however, offered
a good workout in the literature of psychical research, as he was at that time
Richard Hodgson Fellow in Psychical Research, and I latched on and worked
under his direction. There I became acquainted with large masses of interest-
ing research material which were, and still are, largely unknown-indeed,
taboo-wherever orthodox psychology is organized. It began to be plain that
I could train myself for an academic career in psychology, and handle psy-
chical research on the side.
The United States declared war on Germany in April, 1917, and June
saw me in the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit, a small medical-surgical outfit sent
overseas in September, 1917. We did not see much active service. I learned
a good deal from the other men, and from the French families with whom
we chatted. I came back in the summer of 1919, and on the basis of friendly
and effective guidance from R. S. Woodworth, settled down for what was
destined to be a period of twenty-one years at Columbia. My response to
Woodworth is contained in an obituary notice (1963). Not only was the
experience with him a fine one, but I enjoyed membership in the group,
especially the brilliant teaching of H. L. Hollingworth, the friendly support
of A. T. Poffenberger, and many staff friendships, of which by far the strong-
est was that with Otto Klineberg. At Columbia also in those years were Ruth
Benedict, Margaret Mead, and a little later, Robert and Helen Lynd, of
Middletown (1929) fame, whom I had met in Florence in 1923; all of these
became life-long and intimate friends.
While doing graduate work at Columbia (1919 to 1922), I was also
258 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

taking courses at the New School for Social Research, a brilliantly organized
new educational effort, and at Union Theological Seminary, where the work
included some of the greatest teaching of my life, notably Fosdick's "The Use
of the Bible," and Scott's "Life of Christ."
Thanks largely to Woodworth, I began in 1920 to teach in "The Exten-
sion," later known as General Studies, and went on with this while commut-
ing back and forth to Boston as holder of the Richard Hodgson Fellowship
in Psychical Research, for which McDougall had suggested I might apply.
My collaborators there were Harry Helson and George Estabrooks. The strain
involved in the double responsibility and the travel probably had something
to do with my succumbing to a bad case of the grippe in March, 1925, from
the consequences of which I did not recover for nine years. As a semi-invalid,
I carried on with my teaching, but I could not do much research.
One of the courses I greatly enjoyed teaching all during this time at
Columbia was entitled the History of Modern Psychology, organized while
on a wandering summer trip in Europe in 1923. My life-time friend, Frank
Lorimer, together with Theodore Newcomb, and a particularly thoughtful
and challenging student back from France, Ruth Munroe, enlivened that
course for me in 1924-25.
H. L. Hollingworth asked one day at the Faculty Club, "Now you've
done the work of pulling all this material together, why don't you write a
book?" I was surprised, and delighted. In those years there was, of course,
no "history of psychology" that was used much by psychologists. Brett's three-
volume History of Psychology (1921) was a useful survey of a philosopher's
psychology, with a little bit in Volume III about modern experimentalism,
but not a very clear indication of how modern psychology came into being;
and the preface showed that Brett intended anyway to stop at the year 1900.
In addition to Brett, I had a fair reading knowledge of the history of philoso-
phy, absorbed during a wonderful five weeks in the summer of 1916, cycling
in from Concord to the new Widener Library at Harvard, reading philosophy
all day every day. This was profoundly satisfying to me. An indelible impres-
sion was made on me then and later by Heraclitus, Socrates, Epicurus, and
the Pythagoreans, and my enthusiasm was kept alive by applying them, year
by year, to new situations. But it was the growth of modern psychology that
I wanted to emphasize. Ladd and Woodworth's Elements of Physiological
Psychology (1911), William James' Principles (1890), which I had read in
1920, and a few other mainstays got me organized. When the course began
in the fall of 1923, the lectures went well.
In 1926 the stenotyped lectures were read back to me by three devoted
Columbia students, my eyes being at that time unequal to the task of read-
ing; through dictating corrections to them the typescript was put through
several revisions; however, in 1927 in response to the very unorthodox meth-
ods of Dr. Frank Marlow, my eyes recovered so that I could read the proofs.
I had made a contract with C. K. Ogden of the International Library of
GARDNER MURPHY 259

Psychology, using Harcourt Brace and Company as American outlet. The

book appeared in January, 1929. It was really in the nick of time, for E. G.
Boring's History of Experimental Psychology (1929) had not come out.
When it did, I found a generous appreciation of my Historical Introduction
(I929) in Boring's words, and as things worked out, his book and mine never
really "competed" in any serious sense. All psychologists were grateful for his
book, and a number could see the utility of my own effort, which dealt with
some things which he had not touched upon; the same applied, actually, to
the revisions of these books, for as it happened, he and I were both revising
in 1948, and the 1949 revision of my book could not have been a competitor
to his, nor was it so designed. It still represents, quite well, my general perspec-
tive regarding the evolution of psychology. Of course, it does not do justice
to social psychology or personality study or parapsychology, but these were
dealt with in separate works. An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, edited in
the spring of 1928, appeared a few weeks after the Historical Introduction
in 1929; Arthur H. Bachrach and I brought out a revised edition in 1954.
I gave up the Richard Hodgson Fellowship (June, 1925) and settled
down to an instructorship at Columbia.

MARRIAGE
The following spring, when Ruth Munroe invited me over, I met her
roommate, Lois Barclay, a student at Union Seminary, with whom a new kind
of world began. Despite my poor health, we explored many things in heaven
and earth, especially during the year following, when she was teaching in
Baltimore; on my weekends there we talked and walked, and rode in Balti-
more's "dainty car" taxis, getting to know each other well. We were married
in 1926. Her interest in education, in clinical psychology, and in comparative
religion, deeply reinforced my own, and we began a sharing of intellectual,
esthetic, philosophical, and other concerns like music, mountains, and travel,
which has never diminished. The summer of 1929, spent in Europe, strength-
ened all these interests and gave us a common fund of rich experience. Her
interest in psychical research, as a challenging pioneer field, was a primary
factor in maintaining my own morale.
Our son, AI, born in 1930, and our daughter Midge, coming to us in
1932, gave another rich dimension to life-AI through his incredible clarity
of perception and expression, his unlimited devotion to high standards in
literature and music, and his Olympian sense of humor, and Midge for her
robust directness, her earthy healthiness, her creativity, and her enthusiasm,
gaiety, and warmth.
We lived in New York from the time of our marriage until 1935. Lois'
major professional activity was teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronx-
ville. After two years in Tuckahoe, we moved to Bronxville in 1937, the year
260 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

in which she completed the Ph.D. degree at Teachers College. I was teach-
ing, in addition to the history, a course in social psychology for graduate stu-
dents, and at times, a course in abnormal psychology, and I supervised a very
large number of master's essays. My preoccuption with Ph.D. dissertations,
mainly in social psychology, began with Rensis Likert in 1929, and continued
through a period of eleven years in which Eugene Hartley, Muzafer Sherif,
Sol Diamond, Joan Criswell, Ruth J. Levy, and others enriched my experience.
In 1934, having tried everything on the face of the earth recommended
by orthodox medicine-and that includes literally dozens of ingenious devices
-to try to get over the severe sequelae of the grippe which I had in 1925, I
ran across Dr. William H. Hay's combination of diet and general physical
revamping, regarded by most medical men as sheer quackery. Within a
month I found myself restored to excellent health. As Lois said at the time,
when she saw me after coming from Hay's sanitarium, "Why, Gardner,
you're all pink now, instead of sallow." This, and the experience with Doctor
Marlow, were among the things that convinced me that the unorthodox could
be the thing that really worked.

EARLY PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

The kind of psychology that I found myself believing in during the

early Columbia years was simply the broadest, deepest, most comprehensive
psychology that I knew how to comprise. I did not believe that being sys-
tematic necessitated giving up varied interests in rich material wherever it
can be found. In the summer of 1920, while working with F. L. Wells at
McLean Hospital, I had read through the two-volume William James' Prin-
ciples of Psychology (1890), and loved it utterly. Working with Woodworth
was a delight, and I held the "middle of the road" position so firmly that I
could never see how anybody could want to give up the large vista which
you could see if you are willing to turn your head. This did not mean at all
being orthodox in beliefs. It meant getting a stance from which you can see
everything as you travel along. It made sense at Columbia, and although
there was no very strong positive "ism," doctrine, dogma, or even method to
be obtained there, I was happy in the catholicity of the spirit which radiated
from Woodworth, and to some degree from all of his associates.
Such efforts as I made along systematic lines appear in my Historical
Introduction to Modern Psychology (1929), especially in the 1949 revision;
the introductory chapter to the Experimental Social Psychology (1931); and
in the introduction to an elementary text, A Briefer General Psychology
(1935). I had begun as general editor for the Harper Psychology Series in
1931, and continued until just now (1965), turning it over to Wayne H.
Holtzman; this undoubtedly played a part in keeping me oriented to a rather
wide range of interests. I became, to some degree, a specialist in social psy-
GARDNER MURPHY 261

chology; that is, I handled the dissertations in that field from 1929 onwards,
often working together with Otto Klineberg in this area of responsibility.
The most important components in my broad or eclectic or tolerant or
flexible, or whatever I like to call my beliefs (of course, they would be called
chaotic, confused, fragmented, and a lot of other things by those not con-
genial to them), were first a passionate conviction that things are best under-
stood through the study of their origins and evolution; second, a belief that
psychology is only separable from the biological sciences on the one hand,
and the social sciences on the other, through some sort of arbitrary compart-
mentalization which is likely to do much more harm than good; third, that if
psychology is seriously the study of the whole organism. the whole individual,
it is necessarily a study of experience, attitude, immediacy, as well as a study
of what is observed from outside; fourth, that behavioral studies are good,
and behavioristic beliefs are bad for science; fifth, that inclusiveness, and an
accent on the positive, necessitates encouraging many primitive, groping ef-
forts which might sometime become science, though it will be a long way to
get there. Tinker taught me in freshman English the slogan "plus ultra." He
explained that this phrase symbolized the open world after the Pillars of
Hercules had been bravely passed; before, it was ne plus extra, but thereafter,
the words ran simply "plus ultra": "There is more beyond." If I have a
focused philosophy, this is the center of it.
As far as the tasks of psychology are concerned, I would always say that
they are bigger than anyone dreams; the methods are more numerous; the
dimensions are greater; and the ultimate contributions greater than can be
guessed. When Lois and I discovered Walt Whitman, he became for us the
poet of this belief in limitlessness. One other poetic message has been life-
blood to me: John 1\1asefield' s series of sonnets on the self, beginning, "Here
in the self is all that man can know! Of beauty, all the wonder, all the power,"
and including the one that begins "If I could get within this changing I."
This vision of man's resonance to the world is what I think psychology is
all about.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Now for some more specific words about my interest in social psychol-
ogy. As an undergraduate at Yale, I had responded to J. M. Baldwin's Mental
Development in the Child and the Race (1895), including Social and Ethical
Interpretations, and as I have noted above, the anthropology with Keller was
deeply impressive. Though the social psychology of the period was largely
centered in McDougall (Woodworth, for example, built his course largely on
McDougall) there were striking new beginnings.
Floyd H. Allport, whom I had known when we were both graduate
students at Harvard in 1916 and 1917, was of course, pointing towards a
262 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

new scientific systematization of social psychology. I met him on a road in

France, back of the lines, in 1918, and bumped into him again in New York
in the mid-1920's. He had plainly shown the importance of the experimental
method, elaborating and transcending the experiments of Moede and others
in pre-World War I Germany. When I began, in 1924, to think of social
psychology as my professional specialization, I gratefully went along with
Floyd Allport. In fact, he was good enough to recommend me to pinch-hit
for him, teaching social psychology at Syracuse University in the summer
session in 1927; and I organized my teaching, to some degree, in his terms.
I was, however, much dissatisfied with what I thought was over-emphasis
upon the "behavior viewpoint" which I thought left out the personal world
of the social initiator and the social responder-the very issues which Muzafer
Sherif later brought into the picture, in 1934 and 1935.
When, in 1924, Woodworth decided not to offer his evening graduate
class in social psychology, he asked if I was interested in taking it, and of
course, I was. From 1924 to 1929, during each fall term I dealt with a more
or less systematic picture of hereditary and acquired components in social
behavior, including the usual thing on suggestion, imitation, and sympathy,
the self, the group, etc., and during the spring dealt with individual differ-
ences in social attributes. When, however, the Lynds' Middletown came out
in 1929, I began to use that as the basis for the spring semester and built up
in each spring term a social psychology with a more or less sociological orien-
tation, emphasizing the mores as I had come to know them through Keller,
and of course, using the institutional system of the Lynds as a way of intro-
ducing psychological concepts.
I had, however, other aims in the field. The time was coming for an
organized presentation of the experimental possibilities extending in every
direction which human ingenuity would allow. Owing largely to the interest
of Robert S. Lynd, I attended the "personality and culture" discussion organ-
ized by Edward Sapir for the Social Science Research Council at Hanover
in 1930. These problems brought us into contact with Lawrence K. Frank,
then of the General Education Board, who became an intimate friend. In
many summers in Holderness, New Hampshire, Larry and Mary Frank have
afforded us warm and deep sharing of professional and personal interests.
That fall found Lois and me hard at work organizing the research mate-
rials which we had been able to find in the field-Lois doing the child material,
and I the adult. Simultaneously with my becoming Psychology Editor for
Harpers, we brought out, in June of 1931, the first edition of Experimental
Social Psychology; the Butler Medal at Columbia was awarded me the follow-
ing year for this book. Of course, the most important thing was that Lois and
I found ourselves with a specialization which we could share, and have shared
ever since. This book helped to introduce me as a serious social psychologist,
and doubtless helped me attract some of the stimulating students who came
GARDNER MURPHY 263

to the social psychology course. In 1937 we were joined by our dear friend,
T. M. Newcomb, in revising this book.
Lois' background in child and clinical psychology made a huge impact
on me too; she was constantly seeing personality issues of which I was aston-
ishingly unaware. Her work, together with Eugene Lerner, Benjamin Spock,
L. Joseph Stone, and their colleagues at Sarah Lawrence, leading to the stud-
ies on Personality in Young Children (1941), embodying her kind of sensi-
tive study of the whole individual child, became primary in the development
of my empirically grounded field theory of personality. While the term "field
theory" was used generally to describe Kurt Lewin's approach, the actual
meaning of the concepts as developed in my Personality (1947) book and in
Human Potentialities (1958), were derived in large measure from the rich
empirical material on child development which she was constantly working
through.
The 1930's were exciting years in the New York intellectual world, with
the gifted emigres from Europe contributing to ongoing research as well as
to therapy and the social sciences at the New School for Social Research
inspired by their presence. Lois met Erik Erikson, Peter BIos, and Fritz Redl
through her collaboration with Carolyn Zachry's psychoanalytically oriented
adolescent study. Her collaboration with Anna Hartoch Schachtel led to our
joint reading of Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics (1921).
This concern with personality development continued, and has played
a big part in our years at The Menninger Foundation, where she has carried
out intensive longitudinal studies of normal children who had been studied
as infants, combining psychological, pediatric, psychiatric, and educational
materials in a rich study of individuality. Her psychoanalytic training in
Topeka deepened her approach and led to new concepts, building on the
foundations she had built from her contact especially with Erikson.
But during the remaining years at Columbia (to 1940), social psychology
was my major concern. I had made up a small project in 1928-29 for the
study of social attitudes, organized around concepts of liberalism and con-
servatism, and Rensis Likert (who was then C. J. Warden's assistant in the
animal laboratory) decided to work with me on this new project. It was
then that he developed the Likert method of scaling attitudes. Actually he
worked with me in the entire planning of the project, with support from the
Columbia University Council for Research in the Social Sciences, during
the years 1929 to 1932, when he got his Ph.D. It took a good deal of my time
from 1932 to 1938 to write up the material which finally appeared under
the title, Public Opinion and the Individual (with R. Likert, 1938). But this
had started me on research in social psychology, and the next few disserta-
tions were attitude and propaganda studies. Then they became more diversi-
fied. Several of them became studies which we would today call straight
personality, rather than social research. I responded vigorously to David
264 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Krech's organization of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social

Issues, having taken part in the organizational meetings in Hanover in 1936,
and becoming chairman in 1938. That was the same meeting of the APA in
which I took part in J. L. Kennedy's symposium on ESP research. My profes-
sional life in those years was about two-thirds social psychology and most of
the rest was parapsychology.
But this matter of the growth of personality study within the field of
social psychology was penetrating more deeply into my whole outlook, and
the kind of social psychology that meant most to me was personality research
on a social basis, such as that of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934),
Margaret Mead's Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples
(1937), and Abraham Kardiner's The Individual and his Society (1939).
The efforts at field theory, already mentioned, became the core of a person-
ality theory on which I worked with intense delight, responding very keenly
indeed to Harry Murray, to Kurt Lewin, and to J. L. Moreno. The key con-
cept was the notion that the biological and the social are literally the same
events. Defining a specific process in biological terms makes sense if we are
looking at the organism at that moment; when we are looking at the social
context, the same event is a part of social reality. Dozens of problems in the
definition and measurement of personality suddenly change when viewed in
this way.
The 1947 book on Personality evolved largely from the effort to integrate,
in full-fledged literary form, all the major conceptions with which I had been
working, just as the book on Human Potentialities in 1958 was an attempt to
spell out the implications of field theory for the personality-and-culture prob-
lem, as it emerges with the question where man and his society are going,
and what elements of planning and education are available for the fuller
realization of the latent resources within, and the latent cultural structures
which may emerge, to permit new man-world interactions.
The use of psychology in international relations had taken shape dimly
in my thinking in the college years dominated by W orId War I. (In 1915 I
gave an address in an oratorical competition entitled "A Larger Neutrality.")
During the 1920's this came with increasing clarity to be seen as an important
part of social psychology; Rensis Likert and I included "internationalism"
among the issues dealt with in his 1932 dissertation. A good many "peace
activities" occupied me at varying levels of effectiveness: Fellowship of Recon-
ciliation, American Friends Service Committee, etc., and I edited a volume for
The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) entitled
Human Nature and Enduring Peace (1945) which took up a good deal
of time between 1941 and 1945. Some of the rudiments of a psychology
relative to the prevention of war gradually became clear.
The whole groping effort found much more practical form when Robert
Angell and Otto Klineberg asked me, in the fall of 1949, whether I was avail-
able to go to India for UNESCO to study the Hindu-Muslim conflict. This
GARDNER MURPHY 265

was to be financed by UNESCO, but involved reporting to the Government

of India. In fact, Lois and I had always been interested in India, as we had
both been students of comparative religion who felt somewhat at home in
studies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and the other religions of South Asia.
We had, of course, deep respect and enthusiasm for what Gandhi had been
doing. Accordingly, with the enormously generous and wise guidance of
Pars Ram of Forman Christian College, who was at the moment in New
York, and the very helpful practical counsel of Professor C. N. Vakil of the
Bombay School of Economics and Sociology who stopped in New York in
March, 1950, we made a six months' visit in India from August of 1950 to
January of 1951. Lois had simultaneously been invited to be a consultant on
a plan for the B. M. Institute for Child Development initiated by Gautam
Sarabhai of Ahmedabad, a leader in Indian educational and cultural activi-
ties. The trip gave her an opportunity for many village contacts and observa-
tion of child life and education, while for me it offered an opportunity to
travel about from one Indian university to another, getting the help of Indian
educational leaders at conferences, and in several cases in establishing re-
search teams at these universities. The report on this exciting venture would
probably have gathered dust for a long time, perhaps forever, had not Arthur
Rosenthal of Basic Books asked for my report in book form, which appeared
in 1953 under the title In the Minds of l\1en. This did not have a marked
effect on Indian foreign policy, but it did have an effect on attitudes within
the Indian universities towards the possibilities of doing social research which
might make a difference in the national life.
I continued actively interested and worked with AP A and SPSSI groups,
giving many lectures on "psychology in international relations," and have
learned much from the important new steps taken, as for example by Dan
Katz through the Center for Conflict Resolution at the University of Michi-
gan, Charles Osgood's worldwide studies by the semantic differential, Donald
Michael's work at the Institute for Policy Studies, and Robert North's large-
scale studies of war origins. My belief that a tiny dent on the war problem
is being made by psychology is deeply gratifying.

PERCEPTION AND COGNITION

A specific research focus began to take shape about 1935 when I offered
a course in personality in the Columbia summer session, worked the person-
ality material into my social psychology more and more, and formulated
problems for a psychology of the person in the social situation; these appeared
in master's theses and doctor's dissertations.
Almost simultaneously, in 1935 and 1936, my own version of field theory
emerged (of which more below), and I began to formulate hypotheses for
experimental testing in this field. Sherif was teaching me a great deal about
the control of perception by factors in the person and in the environment
266 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

which had heen grossly neglected hoth by psychology and by the social sci-
ences. Kurt Lewin, though I then knew him but slightly, soon began to push
me too. Lois and I were both discovering more about Freud and Bleuler. All
of this contributed to a conception which synthesized these, plus some Sher-
rington, to the effect that personality study has to be defined with an emphasis
on the "input," the perceptual-cognitive side; that the personality is largely
a way in which the world is viewed; that the problems of social psychology are
determined by the conlluence of outer and inner determiners, as in the fol-
lowing diagram later published in the book on Personality (1947, p. 8),

All the functional relations within the shaded area, and between the shaded and
unshaded areas, constitute personality. The shaded area is the organism.

A personality is a structured organism-environment field, each aspect of

which stands in dynamic relation to each other aspect. There is organization within
the organism and organization within the environment, but it is the cross organ-
ization of the two that is investigated in personality research. (1947, p. 8)

To get at these problems of perception and cognition it was necessary,

with Sherrington, to regard the exteroceptive, interoceptive, and propriocep-
tive systems as merging or pooling their energies in the centers, and to regard
a psychology of personality as focused largely on the issue of how the inter-
action of these three input factors is actually effected. This meant, for experi-
mental purposes, that there must be a systematic study of the role of drive in
perception and thought. Looking back over the years, it began to be clear
that many heroic figures in the history of psychology had grasped this, among
them Nietzsche and Freud, and that the first great insight into a method for
experimentally examining such phenomena was expressed in the work of
Rorschach.
A large factor in my going to City College in 1940 was the opportunity
to pursue this research theme. For it was here, in the years between 1940 and
1943, that the honors studies of Robert Levine, Harold Proshansky, Roy
Schafer, Jerome Levine, and Leo Postman were carried out under my general
guidance.
Robert Levine's study, taking much of the inspiration from H. A. Mur-
GARDNER MURPHY 267
ray and from the published studies of R. Nevitt Sanford, showed, in response
to pictures, the relation of frequency of food-naming responses to the time
since eating. Harold Proshansky found that objects seen with difficulty in a
dark room took on characteristic associations with monetary rewards. Roy
Schafer reported that in an ambiguous figure-ground situation, a rewarded
component tends to stand out as figure. Jerome Levine found that political
attitudes influenced the learning and forgetting of controversial material.
Leo Postman's study showed that attitude influenced associative memory.
Historically, the primary credit for laboratory studies of these influences
of drive, feeling, affect, motive, etc., upon perception belongs to Harry
Murray and his associates at Harvard, with R. N. Sanford the first to publish
a report on such effects. Our City College studies followed for several years
thereafter, and were of course, followed, and in many ways extended, elabo-
rated, and improved by Bruner and Postman at Harvard immediately after
World War II. These interests remained keen with me during the City Col-
lege period, and in 1951 Julian Hochberg and I reformulated them. But the
City College situation became less and less favorable for the prosecution of
such studies, as practically all able psychology students were heading for
clinical psychology and saw relatively little significance in these laboratory
approaches. It was also obvious that a larger canvas was necessary on which
to work. The opportunity to pursue this kind of investigation at The Men-
ninger Foundation, beginning in 1952, was again my primary reason for a
professional shift. During the years here at The Menninger Foundation as
Director of Research, my own primary research interest has been in the con-
tinuation of these studies, which were integrated into a book mainly written
by my collaborator, Charles M. Solley, in 1960, and in a series of papers.

PERSONALITY THEORY

This conception of the relation of perception and cognition to the affec-

tive life, and to the learning process, was really the core of a complete person-
ality system, as I saw it. It appears in brief form in Chapter 39 of Personality
(1947), and is spelled out a bit more in the Human Potentialities (1958),
and various short papers. But perhaps the growth of my general outlook on per-
sonality is best indicated by first describing the components in such a system
as I used in the 1930's, and the mode of their articulation. This will, in a
sense, "place" and likewise "date" me, but it may have the advantage of show-
ing what I accept from the major systems of the modern era.
Some inkling of the direction in which I was going emerged in 1931,
when Lois and I were in the Grand Canyon. It became clear to me that it
was the inner world of the person that was most real to me, and that person-
ality study would be my primary concern. Within a few months of that time
I found myself writing and editing Approaches to Personality (with F. Jen-
268 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

sen, 1932), which presented six systematic positions. First came the "Psy-
chology and Mental Elements" which was classical sensationistic or associa-
tionistic psychology, the representation of which by Titchener had delighted
me. I could readily follow his conception of sensations, images, and feelings,
and the various ways in which higher-order realities were represented by
association and attention. This kind of elementarism was compared with the
elementarism of Janet in which the mind is reducible, at anyone time, to
components which may be put together in various ways under the influence
of "psychic tension." Then I went on to the behaviorist approach which, in
those years, meant mainly Watson, from which I expected to borrow a good
deal, especially with reference to the use made of classical conditioning in
normal and psychopathological events. Here close friendship with Harold and
Mary Jones, who later established the Institute of Child Welfare Research
at Berkeley, did much to bring the system close. Working on the Russian and
American backgrounds for the Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology
(1929) had given me a positive feeling towards the Watsonian system, al-
though I felt that it was grossly defective in its handling of the learning
processes and arbitrary and arrogant in its neglect of problems for which it
did not have any tools. Then came the Gestalt approach, to which I had been
awakened when R. M. Ogden described it at the AP A in 1922. I was de-
lighted with Kohler and Ko£fka as they came to our shores in this era, and
poured into this little treatment of my own an enthusiastic account of the
conception of personality as Gestalt which Wertheimer, Wol£f, and Arnheim
had been sketching out in Germany. Participation in a conversation with
Wertheimer and Stern at the King's Crown Hotel in New York in 1933 was
one of the great events of my professional life: Wertheimer pleading for uni-
versal Gestalt, Stern insisting that there was also Ungestalt. In the latter half
of that 1932 book, my collaborator, Friedrich Jensen, handled psychoanalysis,
analytical psychology, and individual psychology-his bias being towards the
last of these. My good friend, John Levy, an analyst, added an appendix on
the child guidance approach to personality.
This six-fold conception of Approaches to Personality (with F. Jensen,
1932) stayed with me until 1935 and 1936, when I found myself inclining
to make less and less of the Titchenerian approach, and more and more of
the evolutionary background, and to emphasize both phylogenetic and onto-
genetic approaches to personality. I decided to call this the "organic" approach,
meaning the approach in terms of organism (believing then, as I do still, that
the distinction in psychiatry between "Functional" and "organic" is slippery
and often unmanageable, and that all psychological functions can be viewed
as functions of an organic system, whether intact, or slightly disturbed, or
patently damaged). I began at the same time to be more and more impressed
with the anthropological contributions to personality study.
By the end of the 1930's the seven major approaches which I used in my
GARDNER MURPHY 269
own thinking and teaching were: (1) the organic approach (with a good
deal of genetics and physiology); (2) the behavioristic, with emphasis upon
classical conditioning (a little on operant conditioning too, but without a very
sharp and clear theoretical separation of the two); (3) the Gestalt approach,
emphasizing mainly perceptual learning and finding ways in which both the
organic system as a whole, and the classical conditioning concepts helped to
explain emotionally loaded forms of perceiving and thinking-what I came to
call, after Bleuler, "autism." (4) Then the discussion of perception led to a
fairly ambitious self-psychology, which led on into the presentation of (5)
Freudian psychoanalysis, followed by brief concern with J ung and Adler,
leading then (6) into a social science definition of personality utilizing all
the foregoing concepts, and culminating in (7) field theory.
I have sufficiently indicated my biases, but will say just a few words
more. I still think the sensationist and other atomistic approaches are entirely
legitimate but have a very limited scope; the same for all systems which claim
to be "objective"; for as Hollingworth shrewdly pointed out, systems called
objective are systems preferring exteroceptive over other sources of informa-
tion, but there are also good enteroceptive, proprioceptive, and memoric
sources; no magical results are achieved for science by being so "objective" as
to exclude them.
Regarding Freud's psychoanalysis, on which I have expressed myself a
number of times, I believe we are dealing with the greatest genius which has
appeared in psychological history, and that the question of finding the ulti-
mate realities underneath this magnificent system will keep us busy for at
least a century. The ideas essential for the general psychologist and the per-
sonality psychologist can probably be stated in a few hundred pages; and the
primary problem today is probably not testing psychoanalytic hypotheses, but
rather, in the manner of an astronomer or a geologist, systematizing observa-
tions, using now an experimental, now a developmental, now a compara-
tive, now a mathematical approach.
To write, however, that psychoanalysis is the most challenging and the
most comprehensive system we now have is not to say that it is correct, or
what part of it is correct. I believe that anyone who tosses it aside as "un-
scientific" might profit by reading Jonathan Swift's gay little essay embedded
within Gulliver's Travels, tossing off Newton and his new universe. Newton
was wrong on many points, and paranoid on some, but that does not settle
any procedural issues for his followers. On the other hand I think the devo-
tion of Freudians to Freud-and sometimes to ideas which he himself revised
or even rejected-puts them into continuous binds. A hundred years after
Darwin's Origin of Species one does not spend a large part of one's time in
biological research deciding exactly what Darwin meant and why he was
right here and wrong there, or justify one's own conceptions as against those
of others. One spends one's time not defending Darwin, but using him as a
270 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

guide to fresh observations. Psychoanalysis could be the most important part

of modern psychology if it were treated in the way evolutionary theory is
treated, as a way of schematizing observations in a process involving endless
vital redefinition of concepts in the light of fresh experience, and fresh
method.
Perhaps I am color blind to Jung. I like to Hoat along with his prose, but
do not feel that his brilliant descriptions help me to understand the why of
what he helps me to observe. Regarding Adler, the shoe is on the other foot:
I think he was painfully correct, as Thomas Hobbes was painfully correct, in
his ultra-simple formulations of inferionty, compensation, life style, and the
social definition of health and illness. He kept saying the same thing on and
on, and there is not very much more that one can say except to repeat what
he said. We do not seem to be able to use ultra-simple, clear ideas in psy-
chology. They have to be complicated to hold our interest.

RECURRING EMPHASES
Among the more specific ideas which I have invested with strong self-
quality, which I think of as "really me," are the ideas of autism, canalization,
Spencerian three-phase evolutionary theory, feedback (especially propriocep-
tive feedback theory), and the type of field theory which I have described
above. It would be tedious to spell them out in detail here; I will just tag
them for anyone who cares to pursue them.
By autism (d. 1947, P: 365) I mean the movement of the cognitive
processes in the direction of need satisfaction. (This is similar to, but a bit
simpler than either Bleuler's "autistic thinking" or Freud's "primary process.")
By canalization I mean approximately what Pierre Janet meant by this term
(and by his concept of draining"): diffuse and scattered energies (tensions)
H

tend to flow into dominant channels; that is, needs tend to become more spe-
cific in consequence of being satisfied in specific ways. This simple idea I
have compared and contrasted with McDougall's "sentiment-formation,"
Woodworth's "mechanisms which become drives," Gordon Allport's "func-
tional autonomy," Tinbergen and Lorenz's "imprinting"-though had I known
of the work on imprinting in 1947, I would have done a better job. I still
think the concept of canalization has value.
By Spencerian three-phase evolutionary theory I mean the doctrine that
all reality (physical, biological, psychological, sociological) tends to move
from homogeneous (undifferentiated) through heterogeneous (differentiated)
to structured (integrated) reality. But J. Hughlings Jackson and Heinz
Werner have done such magnificent things with these conceptions that I am
content to let my elaboration shine entirely through their light.
With feedback theory, which derives, as I use it, from Helmholtz and
GARDNER MURPHY 271

Sherrington (and owes little to modern cybernetics), I have attempted in re-

cent years to construct a theory of reality-testing, and of the mode of escape
from autistic self-deception. This is partially incorporated in a book now seek-
ing its way into published form, with Herbert Spohn as co-author, and I will
not jeopardize its chances by prematurely trying to blurt out what it must
say slowly and sensibly.
These are all developmental concepts. Since my approach is always
couched in developmental terms, I was early drawn to a concern with genet-
ics; one of the big events of my professional life was a conference on behavior
genetics at Bar Harbor, 1946, and I am constantly trying to view personality
problems simultaneously in genetic and in socio-cultural terms.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

But all through these years I was leading a double life, for psychical
research was just as real and important to me as it had ever been. It had be-
come obvious that the problems were much more complicated than I had
seen, and that I was by no means as good an experimenter-either in this or
in other fields-as I thought I was. I found excellent collaborators in J. C.
Pratt and Ernest Taves, who worked with me at Columbia on ESP problems
a little later after J. B. Rhine's first book on that subject came out, and with
J. L. Woodruff at City College. With the stipend from the Richard Hodgson
Fund of Harvard, I guided some studies by these men. Later I was able to
use the stipend from this fellowship, 1942 to 1951, for the studies by Dr.
Gertrude R. Schmeidler (with McConnell, 1958), looking for attitudinal and
deeper personality factors in the successes in ESP which continued to come
our way under controlled conditions in which materials were randomized and
concealed. When they were treated by standard statistics, they consistently
showed positive results to depend upon intra-organismic factors of sorts which
we crudely described under the term "attitude," and later, under personality
dimensions that enter into the more complex Rorschach, TAT, Rosenzweig,
and other such personality evaluation techniques.
Thus while writing the Personality book, I was at the same time guiding
the parapsychological studies just mentioned, and a series of other studies led
by Laura Dale and others at the American Society for Psychical Research, of
which I became a vice-president. A large quiet room was available, and I did
far more experimentation and writing, both in the personality field and in
psychical research, than I ever could have done under ordinary academic
conditions. Incidentally, when Hall and Lindzey prepared their book on
Theories of Personality (1957), they had the graciousness and the patience
to get the whole story of my interest in parapsychology compressed in clear,
272 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

orderly terms, quite faithfully representing the kind of belief and the kind
of research activity which is characteristic of my life in this field.
The removal to The Menninger Foundation in no way impaired these
opportunities, and as good chance would have it, two grants came to The
Menninger Foundation for me to administer, dealing with "Creativity and
Its Relation to Extrasensory Perception." Investigators were chosen, wherever
they were, who had shown interest and competence in these problems, and
given support to expand their work in their own institutions. Believing that
it is not only legitimate, but imperative, for psychologists to work in areas far
beyond the beaten path of existing methods or full-Hedged conceptualized
systems, I believe, as Donald Hebb (1951) well puts it, that if one were to
judge as one ordinarily judges evidence, one would accept ESP. Hebb, at
this point, says that the reason why he does not accept it is that it "does not
make sense." If this statement recognizes that events which do not make
sense from the point of view of science at any given time, can make sense as
science advances, I would fully agree. How far can any new science get by
laying down rules as to what can and what cannot happen? My interest was
not in odds and ends; it was in the extension and maturing of a psychology
which I thought now big enough to struggle with what it could not easily
fit into its systems.
But any system will disintegrate sooner or later if it is brought into con-
frontation with fundamental facts which it cannot assimilate. Although a
dozen powerful minds have made the attempt, I do not know anyone who
has effectively assimilated the literature of psychical research into a general
psychological system, nor, on the other hand, anyone who has found a way
of building a separate system for parapsychological findings in which they
have their own nontroublesome, independent existence. The scientific chal-
lenge to create a kind of field theory sufficiently open to provide a place for
the main parapsychological findings still stands. I have published extensively
along these lines, but the best I can do today is still a pretty poor thing. It
would make use of a monism, rather of Spinoza's type as taught me by Tro-
land at Harvard in 1916, according to which all reality is both physical and
mental, seen on the one side through the exteroceptors (especially when
aided with microscopes looking at brains) and seen on the inside as we
describe our own experiences. Yet this kind of double aspect theory is not,
as of now, able to handle very well what seem to be the realities of telepathic
and clairvoyant contact with events occurring outside the living organic sys-
tem. I rather suspect that we are dealing here with difficulties in the defini-
tion of time and space, and we confront a "rubber sheet" type of phenomenon
in which the events with which we make contact are not really "at a distance,"
or "in the future." The little figure and comment which I am enclosing here
may perhaps convey something of the time-space and cognition theory (1964,
p.243).
GARDNER MURPHY 273

,•....
C #---------11 B

0. I ••••

.~.~.~~~.~..... -..
/
....;
------------~A
Time-space schema in the form of a transparent cube.

I am going to attempt here a graphic image of the ordinary time-space

schema which I have set up in the form of a transparent hollow cube. Imagine
that ordinarily we move along the surface, but not within, and not outside of
this cube. Imagine the time-space relations as binding us to travel or make com-
munication only along the six surfaces of this cube. I suggest that all the space
within this hollow cube allows straight lines to be drawn from one point to an-
other, which is possible, hypothetically, just because the cube is hollow, and the
lines visible just because it is transparent. From this viewpoint, I suggest that
getting from A to B, or from B to C, or to any other determined point on the
surface of the cube, is similar to the ordinary sensory contacts that we make
with other events at other points in space or time; but I also suggest that there
are, as we envisage the possibility, other ways of getting from one point to an-
other, other ways of transcending the time-space problem. I suggest that the
paranormal may force us to consider communication within and outside of the
cube, types of communication not limited to the six surfaces already indicated.
One must probably accommodate to what appear to be facts, but without
giving up the essentially monistic or double-aspect theory of mind; mind is
seen as an aspect of the living system. If you ask what it would mean to say
that this theory is "true," the reply would be that it is not "true" or "false,"
but has a fifty-fifty chance of being in the right direction, and in the mean-
time is open-ended, ready to be stretched by facts into new forms.

TEACHING PSYCHOLOGY

As a college teacher beginning in 1920, and a teacher of graduate stu-

dents beginning the following year, I developed at Columbia some rather
strong convictions about effective teaching of psychology. There W?S plainly
a need for a strongly factual empirical presentation. We reorganized the ele-
mentary course in 1930, using selections and mimeographed portions of the
work of Watson, Piaget, Margaret Mead, and whoever proved to be inter-
esting and challenging. There was patently a need for a chance for students
274 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

to learn by discussion, either through question-answer argumentive discus-

sion in the lecture period or in a special discussion hour. Going to City
College in 1940, I pushed a little further in this direction, teaching a course
on personality from the systematic viewpoint as described, with emphasis
upon facts and ideas considered useful in a large lecture class, and then
meeting small sections for discussion thereafter.
I loved my teaching, partly because it was satisfying to offer a balanced
conception of the field and to exchange ideas with eager students. At Co-
lumbia I was in charge of the undergraduate psychology and taught the
large lecture classes in the introductory course, and the history and social to
graduate students. During the years at City College I went back three years
to teach Otto Klineberg' s Monday afternoon social psychology classes at Co-
lumbia when he was away. These years also included teaching at the New
School one evening a week, alternating between the history course and a
course on the psychology of personality. It was what I taught that I really
began to understand and to organize; and the publications followed, in large
measure, from such efforts.
I have done a great deal of public extramural lecturing too, and have
felt just as strongly in those situations that feedback, argument, discussion,
learning by confrontation of more or less incompatible ideas, were esssential
in all real education. Believing strongly in an active, rather than a passive,
kind of learning, I also believe that the teacher as a person is a very vital
part of the teaching process. It was gratifying when the John Dewey Society
asked me to give in 1961 a lecture on my conception of this role of the
teacher. I was likewise grateful to Eugene Hartley and John Peatman for
saying a bit about my convictions and habits in the teaching stiuation, which
they generously put into the preface of the Festschrift given me in 1960.
But, of course, teaching at the person-to-person level was also possible
in a very rewarding way in the handling of master's essays and Ph.D. dis-
sertations at Columbia, Honors Research Studies at City College, and con-
tact with post- and pre-doctoral research people at The Menninger Founda-
tion. With the years I find myself being taught more and more in such
encounters, because a modern generation of students has gone through a lot
of psychology that I was never taught, and a great deal of it rubs off on
me in one way or another. The teaching process then becomes mainly a
dyadic way of trying to solve a problem, and the conversation never really
ends. It is self-evident to anyone who knows me that I have learned a great
deal more psychology from Lois than from any other living person.
This conception of the multidisciplinary study of man which has taken
shape with such vigor and such rich promise in the last few decades has
meant for me a really radical change in the conception of psychological
method. As a psychology major at Yale, I had believed intensely in the tran-
scendent importance of experimentation as against all other methods. R. P.
Angier and Horace English assigned us reaction time, warm-cold-touch-pain
GARDNER MURPHY 275

spots, association tests, perimetry, and the rest, following Titchener's guide-
lines, as devotedly as anyone could. Horace said one day in the laboratory,
"There are your facts, Gardner; go after them." There was no possible alter-
native, either in external behavior or in internal commitment. At that time
I was sure that this devotion to the facts (mainly at the level of sensory and
associative processes) would ultimately lead to a sound and systematic ex-
perimental psychology dealing with every issue to which the term "psycho-
logical" can be applied.
Gradually, the teaching of developmental psychology and the interest
in heredity, which began to mean more and more to me in the early 1920's,
led to a changed perspective. Exposure everywhere to comparative psychol-
ogy enriched the evolutionary approach which I had been assimilating at
a deeper level ever since the course with Keller at Yale. Charlotte Buhler's
studies of children were really, as she said, social science contributions. I
began to see how all these ideas, in connection with Freud, made psycho-
pathology a part of a general psychological system and not a special recess
or eddy at the fringe.
Various approaches or methods began to be seen in relation to one an-
other. The concept of ecology, as it slowly made its way into social psychol-
ogy, seemed to require that all events be seen as transactions (as Dewey and
Bentley were to say) and that quantitative studies of environments-both its
components and its structural organization-were absolutely essential if even
the simplest psychological reality were to be grasped. What Egon Brunswik
was so magnificently developing conceptually and experimentally, filtered
through to me in a somewhat more turbid form as I struggled with anthro-
pological and historical materials, preparing materials, for example, for the
Committee on Historiography of the American Historical Association as it
worked for the Social Science Research Council. All of this, of course, began
to come together under high pressure, enriching the rather abstract schema
of field theory that I had begun to sketch in 1936.
For many problems, such as those problems we are working on here
at The Menninger Foundation, the experimental method has to be salient.
At the same time, the experimental method does very different things with
a problem when it is seen in terms of the methodological system I have been
trying to sketch.
Of course, one must remember the tragedy of today's psychology in
which experimentalists and clinicians, from their earliest days, take a sort
of Hannibalian oath against one another. The clinicians swear that they will
never take the piddling, petty, rigid, narrow, atomistic approach of the ex-
perimentalists, and the experimentalists take an equally turgid vow that they
will never be concerned with the vague, amorphous, intuitive, sloppy, con-
fused, unsystematic, and irresponsible position of the clinician. Naturally,
many of those who represent the great tradition in other sciences look at us
with "a plague on both your houses" or with a feeling of utter helplessness,
276 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wondering why the study of man has to split him as in the judgment of
Solomon. Perhaps if he were torn apart like a Chinese laundry ticket, and
the parts could still be put together, he would be viable. But with the way
we teach the Ph.D. candidates today, how is this going to happen?

RESONANCE TO WILLIAM JAMES

My devotion to William James began very early, waxed strong in en-

countering his Varieties of Religious Experience in 1916, and became a
steady passion as I read through the whole Principles in the summer of 1920
when working with Fred Wells at McLean Hospital. I encountered him in
new contexts when working on the Historical Introduction to Modern Psy-
chology; put him to use in connection with the theory of the self during the
1930's; read aloud, with Lois, his 1920 collection of letters published by his
son, and, again with Lois, read through the two-volume Thought and Char-
acter of William James by Ralph Barton Perry in the 1940's. I used James
constantly in connection with psychical research over all these and later
years; gladly accepted Robert Ballou's suggestion that we edit together a
volume on William James on Psychical Research (1960); and found him
standing nearby, always ready to be consulted, and often profoundly helpful
in connection with studies at The Menninger Foundation on perception,
attention, thought processes, the will, and the whole evolutionary approach
to the growth of the mind. I have several times attempted brief characteri-
zations of him, as in the Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, espe-
cially in the revised edition (1949, pp. 207-209), and in Personality (1947,
pp. 22-27), as well as in the introduction and summary to William James on
Psychical Research (1960). Several times I have taught courses on the psy-
chology of William James.
Regarding "systems" in psychology, it nearly always happens that facts
discovered by people with radically different viewpoints ultimately have to
be comprised and integrated within a conceptual scheme. Every science
does this, and psychology, the data of which are so extraordinarily complex
and of so many different orders, has to do it on almost every page of its
systematic effort. With a strange lack of perspective regarding the history
of such matters, this integration is often called "eclectic," and is said to in-
volve the wrenching of shreds and patches from different systems in which
they have meaning into a new crazy quilt in which they have no meaning.
This misses, I think, the entire substance of the issue. The facts which have
arisen in many different systems or moods of observation or with tools of
precision must be carefully scrutinized and their status thought through with
reference to one's own coherent position. This issue was brielly discussed in
Approaches to Personality (1932, ch, 8), and I have lived with such a faith
ever since. My book Personality (1947) gratefully accepts observations from
GARDNER MURPHY 277

many systems, but attempts its own system. I believe formly in system; in
much more system than is ordinarily found. But in addition, I very firmly
reject the idea that in order to build a system you must look only at certain
corners or only through certain tubes.
1\ly objection to the behaviorist system, for example, is that there are
vast regions of human experience at which it cannot, dare not, or will not
(choose your own term) look. I think, for example, that dreams, images, joys,
griefs, and experiences of frustration are, in their own right, of enormous
importance. It does not help me to say that behaviorists want to study "verbal
reports" of these experiences. That would be like saying that an astronomer
would like to study "verbal reports" of nebulae or comets. An astronomer
experiences a comet, but he integrates the observation with much other evi-
dence. The behaviorist is right in using exteroceptive channels, but so are
other people right when they use enteroceptive channels or observe states
that are not exteroceptively observable. In studying affects, we need verbal
reports, but we likewise need much other evidence-some of it physiological,
some of it clinical, some of it phenomenological. If psychology makes up its
mind that it will only use a certain kind of sensory input, or certain modes
of perceptual or conceptual analysis, it dooms itself to a warped picture. From
an evolutionary point of view, it was the whole species that survived. and
in terms of genetic and embryological realities. it is the whole individual that
has survived in the growth process. To say that certain aspects of this total
individual are irrelevant to science seems to me to impoverish science. Events
may differ in the order of their objectivity and specificity. But it has been
the rule in the history of science that the fuzzy and nonspecific out at the
fringe get pulled into the focus of the real and become, in time, data of
central significance.
Again, just as one might say that everything is good about behaviorism
except its unwillingness to look in certain quarters, the only thing that is
wrong with Gestalt psychology is that there are kinds of realities at which
it does not look. The enormous importance of the role of feeling or drive
in the perceptual and cognitive life was oddly enough overlooked as long
as possible by the Gestalt psychology, which had been looking for principles
of closure, membership-character, and so forth, in the cognitive life, but
reluctant to find the same principles appearing in the perceptual-affective-
impulsive integrations. Fortunately, this narrowness is disappearing, but
Gestalt psychology laid itself open to the same criticism to which behaviorism
is subject, namely, unwillingness to look.
Regarding psychoanalysis and the other psychotherapeutic or psycho-
pathological systems, the same principle holds. Freud had an exceptionally
brilliant moment in 1895 when he wrote the "Project for a Scientific Psy-
chology," for there was a way in which physiological and psychological
realities could all be seen in terms of one broad mountain-top outlook. He
put it away in the belief that it was premature. Maybe it was. It is Iascinat-
278 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ing today to see the skill with which investigators like Hernandez-Peon are
writing a sort of double-language system in which psychophysiological reali-
ties are one, not two; or rather, in which a double language-system refers to
the same central biological realities. Just as Spinoza in the seventeenth cen-
tury saw, there are two (or more) aspects of all psychological realities; in-
deed, today it is entirely possible to write an experiential, a preconscious,
an unconscious, a neurophysiological, a biochemical, or a broadly functional
description of the same system of events. All of these are aspects of some-
thing which in nature is not divided up according to disciplines or techniques.
The only thing uncongenial to me in any school or system of psychol-
ogy is its tendency to put up exclusive barriers or throw things into "waste-
baskets." Wastebaskets, like those of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, have
turned out to yield most interesting things to people of another era. The
one great danger to the jet-like scientific development in psychology is that
it will throw out the things that cannot be picked up while going at its
present speed, and using the present instruments of observation. It will pay
terribly. In fact, it is already paying in the sense of losing contact with
the thoughtful people in other sciences (many of whom cannot understand
why psychology is so narrow and pedantic), and of course, likewise his-
torians, creative artists, and the professional men who very much want a
psychology that aspires at least to completeness and to closeness to the human
nature which makes up their primary interest in life.

PHILOSOPHY

I have mentioned my excitement and delight from reading history of

philosophy in the Widener Library in the summer of 1916. I went on read-
ing philosophy off and on in connection with teaching the history of psychol-
ogy, in connection with the elements of social philosophy that came nearest
to social psychology, and in connection with the whole attempt to see where
psychology stands among the divisions of knowledge and research. Naturally
I wanted to think through some problems and state them clearly enough
to have some impact, and it was partly along these lines that the book Human
Potentialities (1958) was conceived and written. I have always, however,
been more ambitious regarding a possible contribution to philosophy and a
contribution which such a publication might make to contemporary think-
ing. Apparently here, as in some other branches of thought, I exaggerated
what I could do. But the considerable amount of traveling that we have
done, and the delight which Lois and I have had in reading philosophy
aloud to one another-Bergson, for example, and Nietzsche-have served to
make this a considerably more important part of my professional life as a
psychologist than has been evident to my friends.
GARDNER MURPHY 279
This belief that I have something to offer, in a philosophical vein,
expresses itself also in an ambitious effort that Lois and I have made for a
multivolume presentation of the world's psychological classics-ancient and
modern, Eastern and Western-which is rather far along at this writing,
under the general title, The World of the Mind. We are not making a frantic
struggle to complete this at the moment, but if we live to complete it, it
will give a somewhat more rounded picture of the interrelations of philos-
ophy and psychology than is generally available, and it will work out more
fully the position which I hold on many fundamental psychological concepts
and the ways in which they can be resolved by combinations of experimental,
genetic, comparative, physiological, sociocultural methods of investigation.
This much can be said here about the philosophical position which I
have held for some forty-odd years: while I cannot agree with James' sug-
gestion for a "pluralistic universe," a universe lacking essential unity of form
or process, I do believe that from the tiny little gob of time-space which we
occupy, we cannot see the universe as a whole. We can only sample it by
short-range terrestrial observations and by spotty snatches into time and space
by the methods of astronomy. We must pay a great deal of attention to the
range of experiences that come to us as a result of exceptional sampling
from rare, unusual stimulation. Our joys and griefs in the normal course
of life have to be eked out by studies of stress, fatigue, psychosis, the effects
of special training techniques like some of those from India, and of special
biochemical states induced by psychedelic drugs, as well as by studies of
more extraordinary experiences of prophetic and inspirational leaders and
indeed of those poets, painters, sculptors, architects, and composers who
translate us into a world so very different from the ordinary world of our
eyes, ears, and skin. Not that I really believe that we can "see life steadily
and see it whole"; but I do believe that by combining and extrapolating be-
yond all these ways of experience, we can make educated guesses that are
slightly better than those which we can make without them. I believe also
that the methods of science, piercing as they do into mathematical and logical
structure and into the physical world which is only represented here and
there by a ripple of visible reality, lead to a conception that the unknow-
able, to put it mildly, is probably "pretty big," and the knowable but not yet
realizable, though not as big as the unknowable, is still pretty big also. From
this point of view, any statement such as "science has conclusively proven"
or "the world certainly is .... " strikes me as immature. I think our main
task in psychology is to increase the fringe around the present fragmentary
little facts and to extend our methods not only towards the development of
richer sampling of the immediate reality but towards greater comprehensive-
ness, bolder probing of the infinite unknown.
This viewpoint would make me regard man as probably a very small
portion of life, and life as a very small portion of the world. Yet insofar
280 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

as man's makeup may be isomorphic with the broader nature of life or even
of the cosmos, we might steal a march on nature frequently by looking more
closely within ourselves. The importance of majestic creativeness like that
of Rembrandt or Beethoven or Shakespeare lies not in its being a "special
case," but rather in its being a general case, that is, a finger pointing towards
realities we have not well sampled; and in this same way, unusual states,
states of ecstasy, revelation, or "cosmic consciousness" may have implications
not just for psychology, but for the meaning of the whole show.
It is quite likely also that the oddments, the little fragmented particles
which come our way in the realm of parapsychology are important. Perhaps
they are important in the same way as the odd behavior Galvani noted in a
frog's nerve, or the odd behavior of the dark "companion of Sirius" confirm-
ing Einstein's general theory of relativity-as telltale indications of something
which will be explored and ultimately assimilated in a kind of knowledge
of which our present little slice of increasing knowledge from Galileo through
Einstein and Planck and Heisenberg may be only a tiny droplet.
Certainly Dewey was right that one's personality shapes one's philos-
ophy. An enduring and growing trait of mine has been a passionate need
for inclusiveness. My attempt to have in the picture everything that could
be gotten into it, my need for an absolutely inclusive structure barring noth-
ing, may be related perhaps to the "underdog" pattern, or to the "don't leave
me out" pattern. But it probably had other components, particularly some
that became prominent in the college years. I became restless with one-sided
approaches or oversimplified solutions.
This certainly has some relation to my strong feeling that psychology
is sound and vital only when it accepts and welcomes all the evidence, all
the viewpoints, all the facts, all the systematic potentialities that can be
offered. You have to conduct test tube isolation and mathematical abstraction
in all science, but you do not do this by throwing away the things that
do not get into the test tube or the abstraction. Other test tubes and other
abstractions are always available. Other pockets and other ways of generaliz-
ing can be found; it is all of reality that we want and the context is impor-
tant for the understanding of any specific datum. He proceeds at his peril
who takes a cavalier attitude towards anything in heaven or earth. The con-
ception that we know what makes sense, the conception that the world, after
three centuries of science, is at last clear and known to us by the methods
of today, strikes me as one of the most extraordinary blind spots of the ages;
and that it occurs among psychologists, not only among men of the market-
place, strikes me as one more confirmation of the terrific need, if reality
is to be seen, that all kinds of people, all kinds of methods, all kinds of ideas
be winnowed, screened, and studied; none arbitrarily rejected and none arbi-
trarily accepted, but all brought humbly yet systematically before the re-
viewing stand of determined reality seeking.
GARDNER MURPHY 281

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Gardner Murphy

Historical introduction to modern psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace &

World, 1929.
(Ed.) An outline of abnormal psychology. New York: Modern Library, 1929.
Experimental social psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1931.
(with F. Jensen) Approaches to personality. New York: Coward-McCann, 1932.
A briefer general psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1935.
(with L. B. Murphy & T. M. Newcomb) Experimental social psychology. (rev.
ed.) New York: Harper & Row, 1937. (original edition, 1931)
(with R. Likert) Public opinion and the individual. New York: Harper & Row,
1938.
(with H. Proshansky) The effects of reward and punishment on perception.
]. Psychol., 1942, 13, 295-305.
(with R. Levine & I. Chein) The relation of the intensity of a need to the amount
of perceptual distortion: a preliminary report. ]. Psychol., 1942, 13, 282-293.
(with R. Schafer) The role of autism in figure-ground relationships. ]. expo
Psychol., 1943, 32, 335-343.
(with L. Postman) The factor of attitude in associative memory. J. expo Psychol.,
1943, 33, 228-238.
(Ed.) Human nature and enduring peace. Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1945.
Personality: a biosocial approach to origins and structure. New York: Harper &
Row, 1947.
Historical introduction to modern psychology. (rev. ed.) New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1949. (original edition, 1929)
(with J. E. Hochberg) Perceptual development: some tentative hypotheses. Psy-
chol. Rev., 1951, 58, 332-347.
An introduction to psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1951.
In the minds of men: a UNESCO study of social tensions in India. New York:
Basic Books, 1953.
(with A. J. Bachrach, Eds.) An outline of abnormal psychology. (rev. ed.) New
York: Modern Library, 1954. (original edition, 1929)
Affect and perceptual learning. Psychol. Rev., 1956, 63, I-IS.
Notes for a parapsychological autobiography.]. Parapsychol., 1957,21, 165-178.
Human potentialities. New York: 'Basic Books, 1958.
Organism and quantity: a study of organic structure as a quantitative problem.
In B. Kaplan & S. Wapner (Eds.), Perspectives in psychological theory: essays
in honor of Heinz Werner. New York: International Universities Press, 1960,
179-208.
(with R. Ballou, Eds.) William James on psychical research. New York: Viking,
1960.
(with C. M. Solley) Development of the perceptual world. New York: Basic
Books, 1960.
282 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(with the collaboration of Laura A. Dale) Challenge of psychical research: a

primer of parapsychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.
Freeing intelligence through teaching: a dialectic of the rational and the personal.
New York: Harper & Row, 1961.
Robert Sessions Woodworth, 1869-1962. Amer. Psychologist, 1963, 18, 131-133.
Lawfulness versus caprice: is there a "law of psychic phenomena"? J. Amer. Soc.
psych. Res., 1964, 58, 238-249.

Other Publications Cited

Baldwin, J. M. Mental development in the child and the race. New York: Mac-
millan, 1895.
Benedict, R. Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Boring, E. G. A history of experimental psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1929.
Brett, C. S. History of psychology. London: C. Allen, 1921. 3 vols.
Freud, S. Project for a scientific psychology. In Origins of psychoanalysis. New
York: Basic Books, 1954. (Originally circulated in 1895).
Hall, C. S. & Lindzey, C. Theories of personality. New York: Wiley, 1957.
Hebb, D. The role of neurological ideas in psychology. ]. Pers., 1951,20,39-55.
James, \V. Principles of psychology. New York: Holt, 1890. 2 vols.
Kardiner, A. The individual and his society. New York: Columbia, 1939.
Ladd, C. T. & Woodworth, R. S. Elements of physiological psychology. (rev. ed.)
New York: Scribner, 1911.
Locke, J. Essay concerning human understanding.
Lynd, R. & Lynd, Helen M. Middletown: a study in contemporary American cul-
ture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929.
Masefield, J. Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1955.
Mead, M. Cooperation and competition among primitive peoples. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1937.
Murphy, Lois B. Personality in young children. 2 vols. New York: Basic Books,
1956. (Originally published in 1941).
Peatman, J. C. & Hartley, E. L. (Eds.) Festschrift for Gardner Murphy. New
York: Harper & Row, 1960.
Rorschach, H. Psychodiagnostics. Berne: Hans Auber, 1942. (Originally pub-
lished in 1921).
Schmeidler, G. R. & McConnell, R. A. ESP and personality patterns. New Haven:
Yale, 1958.
Spencer, H. First principles. New York: Appleton, 1900.
Swift, J. Gulliver's travels. (part III, chs. 2-3).
283
Henry A. Murray
PROLOGUE

It occurred to me that the easiest way for a veteran examiner of men

to cope with this present assignment would be to hold the mirror up to the
manifestations of his own nature pretty much as he would do in the case of
any individual who volunteered as subject for exposure to the threatening
and dubious procedures of assessment. This notion was particularly inviting
at this moment since it offered me a chance to illustrate the applicability of
some unfamiliar ideas to which I am nowadays attached, and since, by so
doing, I might alleviate to some extent the tedium of a long parade of un-
exciting and unilluminated facts. Full of enthusiasm I embarked on the
execution of this plan with the special purpose of representing and explain-
ing the professional mentational history of my subject, whose pseudonym
is Murr, in terms of the theoretical system to which I currently subscribe;
but in due course I found myself involved in the conceptualization of the
concrete system of mental operations by which Murr had arrived at the
theoretical system, the very terms of which I was then using to conceptualize
the concrete system which produced them. It was not till I arrived at these
complications that I concluded that this mode of coping with the task would
be impossible within the space that was fittingly allotted us. I had been
yielding, once again, to an expansive, omnivorous, sanguine disposition (the
"sanguine surplus," let us say for short) which leads me to start by envisag-
ing every new, appealing undertaking in the most voluminous dimensions,
huge and teeming with every possibility of adventure and achievement. I
have illustrated this impediment to sound science at the outset because it
is one of those temperamental forces which, however exhilarating and fructi-
fying, has rocked or wrecked a whole procession of enterprises, despite the
continued existence in my head of the corrective maxim: limitation of aim
is the secret of success.
The functionally autonomous governor of my conscious ego system (the
little self) is now definitely resolved to ostracize theory and the sanguine
surplus (from the larger Self) and cleave to the corrective maxim. And so,
in order to improve its chances of carrying out this resolution I have decided:
285
286 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(1), to omit those experiences and activities and those components of per-
sonality which Murr has shared with the majority of his colleagues and, at
the risk of portraying him as a repellent freak, focus on his peculiarities and
eccentricities; and (2) from these peculiarities select those that are pertinent
to one or more of these four topics: (i) M urr' s discovery of psychology as
his vocation, (ii) his conception of his role in this domain, (iii) his accom-
plishments, and (iv) his retrospective critical evaluation of his professional
endeavors. [To facilitate the victory of the corrective maxim, there is the
presence in the bibliography of two papers written by Murr which tak en to-
gether constitute a sizable chunk of what could be termed his intellectual
autobiography. When necessary in the ensuing text the first of these papers
will be referred to as Auto. 1, the second as Auto. 2.] Finally there is the task
of steering a fitting course for M urr between the Scylla of concealment and
mendacity and the Charybdis of the "meanest mortal's scorn."

THE CASE OF MURR

MURR'S VOCATIONAL CHOICE

The Improbability of Murr's Vocational Choice. The first question

relevant to the purposes of this volume is: what were the determinants of
Murr's exultant selection of academic psychology in 1926 as the domain
for his vocational life from then on? Could his decision have been antici-
pated by the experts? In 1926, when Murr was admitted to the Harvard
Department of Philosophy and Psychology, his past history differed from all
but a small fraction of one per cent (as a crude estimate) of the membership
of the American Psychological Association (as it was then and as it has
been over the years, so far as I can tell) in most of ten respects. In view of
the compounding of these peculiarities, what could an actuarial psychologist
have said except that the probability of Murr's making this decision was
virtually nil. In an actuarial sense, there were no empirical, positive deter-
minants: his record consisted of nothing but items which correlated nega-
tively, to a highly significant degree, with the records of the vast majority
of professional psychologists. For instance: ( 1) M urr' s experience was re-
stricted by his never having studied at a public school. For his first six years
of education he went to two small private schools in New York City and
for the next five years attended boarding school at Groton, Massachusetts.
(2) Throughout those eleven years at school and throughout the four sub-
sequent years at Harvard College, where he received below average grades,
none of his scholastic records were indicative of intellectual interests or apti-
tudes; even less promising was the decline of his marks from year to year
in each of the institutions he attended. (3) One of the several determinants
of Murr's continuously low academic standing at school and at college was
HENRY A. MURRAY 287
his unremitting youthful passion for athletic achievement, an ambition which
was thwarted in most areas of endeavor partly by a basic sensori-motor defect,
but not in rowing, a sport in which endurance, not speed, is at a premium;
and, by sweat and luck, he managed to "make" the crew at Harvard. (4)
After medical school, Murr enjoyed a two-year surgical internship at the
Presbyterian Hospital in New York. (5) This surgical experience was pre-
ceded and followed by what amounted to five years of experimentation and
research relating to the biochemical aspects of various phenomena, for exam-
ple: blood as a physicochemical system; changes in the chemistry of the
blood as found in various diseases and as experimentally produced by para-
thyroidectomy and pyloric occlusion; biochemical, metabolic, and tissue
changes as a function of age in chicken embryos-researches which were
conducted in this country at Harvard, at Columbia, and at the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research, and in England at Cambridge, from which
university he received a Ph.D. in biochemistry. (6) Instead of mathematics
or physics, Murr's earliest avenue of approach to psychology was history (his
field of concentration) and biography, with an emphasis on alienated rebels,
I suspect, since he won the history prize at Groton with a short life of John
Brown of Osawatomie; and much later, a year before he reached psychol-
ogy-after discursive readings in the world's literature which found their
peak in the works of Herman Melville-Murr, regardless of the unpropitious
fact that at school he had received his consistently worst marks in English
composition, zestfully embarked on a biography of that alienated genius.
(7) In the Easter vacation of his year at Cambridge University-working
next to Joseph Needham and J. B. S. Haldone in the laboratory of the Nobel
prizewinner F. Gowland Hopkins-l\1urr spent three weeks of daily sessions
and long weekends with Dr. Jung in Zurich, from which explosive experi-
ence (already described in Auto. I) he emerged a reborn man. (8) Having
been for twenty-four years an incurable stutterer with a very-seldom-over-
come repugnance to public speaking, and (9) having never taken a single
course in psychology, Murr was clearly an extremely reckless applicant and
an extremely risky choice for a life-long job as lecturer in this complex
domain of knowledge, when, at the late age of thirty-three, he was squeezed
into the Harvard faculty by some sort of high-hushed Iinaglings engineered
by Professor L. J. Henderson. (0) Murr was advantaged by having an in-
dependent income which allowed him to accept the offer of a meagre $1800
to serve as the assistant of the famous psychopathologist Dr. Morton Prince
in inaugurating and carrying on research and teaching at the Harvard Psy-
chological Clinic.
The Determinants of Murr's Vocational Choice. A few of the items
which I have listed as actuarial negative determinants of Murr's vocational
choice were, in fact, positive determinants. This discrepancy is readily ex-
plained by the fact that Murr's initial intention was to combine experi-
mentation and psychotherapy in an institutional setting, such as might pre-
288 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

sumably be found in the clinic of a mental hospital. As it happened, Dr.

Prince had had the wisdom to foresee that if in 1926 the clinic (for the run-
ning of which he had raised barely enough funds) were attached to a hos-
pital, research would inevitably give way to the more urgent demands of
therapy. The establishment of a clinic for the treatment of psychoneurotics
under the auspices of a college department of philosophy and psychology
was, so far as I know, an innovation, not only in America but in the world.
And so it is to the occurrence of this highly improbable arrangement that
one may attribute Murr's enrollment as a member of an understandably
reluctant academic department. This being the case, my part, at this point,
is to list the more probable determinants of Murr's analytic interest in people,
his curiosity regarding the "causes" of normal and abnormal human states,
thoughts, and actions, and of his hopeful resolution to reveal them by suit-
able scientific means. The determinants that stand out are as follows: 0)
Murr's first shadowy memory is that of experiencing what he calls the "mar-
row of his being," the nature of which will be described in a later section.
Suffice it to say here that it seems to have sensitized the boy to the sufferings
of other people and to have played a part in his decision, first to become a
surgeon and subsequently a psychotherapist. (2) Murr was exposed to and
may have been somewhat moved by the presence in his environment of
two neuropsychiatric sufferers, younger sisters of his mother: one, the victim
of seasonal psychotic depressions, and the other, a sweet hysterectomized
hysteric, whose daily state of quavering health was, for forty years, the focus
of her four healthy sisters' dutiful and compassionate regard, each of them
vying with the rest for the crown of exemplary charity. (3) Murr was in-
trigued by what he saw of the patients in mental hospitals whose expres-
sions of emotion struck him as more naturally human and appealing than
the perfunctory, official behavior of the tired doctors whose role it was to
label them. (4) At medical school and later, there were many occasions to
be astonished, stimulated, and instructed by Dr. George Draper's pinpoint
observations and brilliant intuitive diagnoses of patients with what was later
to be called psychosomatic illness. For some years he was Murr's most
uniquely influential teacher, both by exhibiting these talents and by ex-
pounding his very original conceptions respecting varieties of human con-
stitution, many of which would eventually be more systematically set forth
by W. H. Sheldon. (5) While working at the Rockefeller Institute, Murr
was repeatedly confounded by a radical theoretical (if not metaphysical)
opposition between the Institute's then-most-famous members, Jacques Loeb,
who stood for an extreme version of mechanism, and Alexis Carrel, the de-
fender of some type of vitalism. How, Murr asked himself, can one account
for such irreconcilable interpretations of identical phenomena? The notion
that science is the creative product of an engagement between the scientist's
psyche and the events to which he is attentive prepared Murr for an en-
thusiastic embracement of Jung's Psychological Types on the very day of its
HENRY A. MURRAY 289
timely publication in New York (1923). Except for Herbert Spencer and
the admirable William James, no theorists in the realm of subjective events
were known to Murr; and this book by Jung came to him as a gratuitous
answer to an unspoken prayer. Among other things, it planted in his soil
two permanent centers of preoccupation: the question of varieties of human
beings and in what terms they can be most significantly represented and
discriminated, and the question of what variables of personality are chiefly
involved in the production of dissonant theoretical systems. These questions
were at the root of l\1urr's first spurt of veritable intellectual interest in the
direction of psychology. The transaction with Jung led to an omnivorous and
nourishing procession of readings through the revolutionary and astonishing
works of Freud and his disciples, heady liquor for the young chemist.
(6) I am venturing the hypothesis that from 1915 to 1923, the chrono-
logical order of the classes of phenomena and of applicable concepts to
which M urr was successively attracted corresponded to the emergent phases
of an epigenetically-deterrnined program of mental maturations. It is chiefly
to the slow pace of this program from birth on that one must attribute the
protracted sleeping span of his intellectual potentials (he was a slow de-
veloper physically and sexually as well); and now I am proposing that, once
awakened, the temporal order of his mental preoccupations was determined
in part by the sequence of objects and events to which he was exposed at
medical school and in part by the recurrence, on a theoretical level, of a
sequence of cortical developments, such as those (as Piaget has shown) that
are manifested in early years by the chronological order in which certain ab-
stract concepts (of increasing difficulty) become comprehensible to the child.
In Murr's case, the sequence of his devotions was as follows: a staunch affec-
tionate affair with anatomy and surgery was succeeded by a brief flirtation
with physiology, which led to a fairly stable, amorous dyad with biochem-
istry, a relationship that deepened when the two of them became involved
with the wonders of embryological metabolism; but, as Fate (the epigeneti-
cal program plus other factors) would have it, this amicable union ended
in a separation when Murr contracted a responsible marriage with psychol-
ogy until death them do part. What calls for an explanation is the fact that
although at the start of medical school M urr was simultaneously exposed
to three distinguished sister disciplines, two of them, biochemistry and physi-
ology, were wallflowers so far as he was concerned, and anatomy, a subject
that is nonseductive to the majority of students, immediately became the
target of his libido. And then in need of explanation is the fact that it was
not until MUff arrived at surgery and visualized his role as that of an
emergency carpenter manipulating visible macro-structures that he began
wondering with serious intent about the invisible micro-events that were
pumping along in the tissues he was grossly handling and turned for an-
swers to physiology, then to biochemistry (the only subject in which he got
a B in medical school), then to physical chemistry (including a course in
 290 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

calculus!) and finally to chemical ontogeny. In shifting his focus of attention

in this manner MUIr was both descending into the hidden and obscure
depths and genesis of living creatures (in compliance with a disposition de-
scribed in Auto. 2) and ascending the Jacob's pecking ladder of the angelic
sciences, although not to a point that was within earshot of the trumpet
of the seraphic physicists. And besides all this, what struck me as indicative
of epigenetical cortical developments was M urr' s apparent repetition of cer-
tain trends of conceptual emphasis that have characterized the history of the
sciences, such as from macro to micro, from matter to energy, from structure
to process, from single entities and processes to systems of entities and proc-
esses, from permanence to change, and so forth; and, generally speaking, in
the case of each of these pairs of complementary aspects of natural phe-
nomena, it is easier to comprehend and deal conceptually with the earlier
than with the later emphasis.
Finally, there remains to be explained, by reference to another part of
the epigenetical program of interior developments, the fact that up to 1923
M urr had been immune to the enticements of all encountered versions of
the science of psychology: a single lecture at Harvard by Professor Munster-
berg, the course in psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and
Surgeons, and a single hour at the hospital with Freud's Interpretation of
Dreams had been enough to cancel whatever potential gust for that sort of
thing was in the offing. But then suddenly Murr was in a blaze, a blaze which
would go on for three years and eventually pressure him to embrace psy-
chiatry and psychology, and so to take the last step in his slow and devoted
recapitulation of the order in which the disciplines pertinent to modern
medicine were founded: anatomy (Vesalius), physiology (Harvey), biochem-
istry (Claude Bernard), and psychiatry (Kraepelin ), with the significant
omission of biophysics, and with evolutions to be subsequently experienced in
the realms of sociology and culturology. All that I have said so far is in be-
half of my thesis that the publication of Jung's book at just that moment
in the course of Murr's mental and emotional metamorphoses is an example
of what Pasteur called chance and the prepared mind.
(7) The actualizations of the genetical program may be mentational in
nature, as I believe they were in Murr's psyche from 1915 to 1923, or they
may be emotional, or both mentational and emotional. From 1923 to 1926,
during which span Murr's bonds of affinity with the creative processes in
chicken embryos were step-wise disengaged and attached to the germinal
affects of human beings, the actualizations he experienced were in part
mentational but predominantly emotional. Throughout his hospital activities,
his emotions had been engaged in empathizing with the somatic discom-
forts and anxieties of each patient, especially on the female ward; but these
involvements were necessarily brief and superficial, and when it came to
chicken embryos, lovely as they were, the opportunities for empathy were
critically curtailed. In short, in view of the profound affectional upheaval
HENRY A. MURRAY 291

that swept Murr into the unruly domain of psychology-and thereby down
the pecking order of the sciences-I am assuming, first of all, that up to that
time an assemblage of emotional potentialities had been denied adequate
participation in his work, and, secondly, that the evolving genetical program
had arrived at a new stage, comparable in a way to that of puberty, because
what surged up was not merely what had been previously excluded, as in
the "return of the repressed," but something wholly novel and astonishing,
never dreamt of in his philosophy, with a dimension of depth and elevation
which landed him in a vast brew outside the husk of his contemporary
world. Instrumental in effecting and reinforcing this transition were inllu-
ences emanating from the up-to-then-neglected realm of art, from artists and
art-sensitive associates: a galaxy of seminal books, especially the works of
Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Proust, and Hardy; the music of Beethoven,
Wagner, and Puccini; the poetry of E. A. Robinson and the plays of Eugene
O'Neill, meeting both of them as well as a number of other poets and
dramatists, actors and actresses, and attending rehearsals of their plays; en-
deavoring to sculpture in clay a head of his beautifully-featured wife in their
backyard; communing with a circle of kindred spirits. including Dr. Alfred E.
Cohn, his boss at the Institute, Robert Edmond Jones. Dr. Carl Binger, who
was about ready to shift from experimental physiology to psychiatry, and
Christiana D. Morgan, who was destined to experience visions which would
occupy the attention of Dr. Jung for twelve memorable seminars and then to
join M urr at the Harvard Psychological Clinic; attending thought-kindling
lectures at the New School for Social Research; and more besides, in this
country and in Europe, not to speak of a femme inspiratrice here and there
along the way. (8) As I have said already, Melville was a very potent factor,
not only, like Beethoven, as a deep prime-mover from the sphere of art and
a model of powerful metaphorical speech, but as an illustrator of nearly
everything that M urr was finding and about to find in Freud and J ung.
(9) The revolutionary sessions with Dr. Jung in Zurich in 1925 (described
in Auto. 1) have been mentioned earlier. This first encounter with an analyti-
cal psychiatrist of the new order provided Murr with an exemplar of genius
that settled the question of his identity to come. (10) Murr's unswerving
addiction to scientific research cancelled the possibility of his devoting the
bulk of his time and energy to private practice, and so (11) when Dr. Morton
Prince made the unprecedented offer of a position as his research assistant
in founding a clinic at Harvard College, this struck M urr as another glorious
instance of chance and the prepared mind.

M URR' S CONCEPTION OF HIS ROLE AND

SOME DETERMINANTS THEREOF

I have pointed out that Murr was an eccentric in about ten respects
when he became an academic psychologist at Harvard in 1926, and now is
292 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

the moment for me to add that within the next few years it became all-too-
obvious that he was a deviant in other respects besides those already men-
tioned, such as his being woefully ignorant of the content of academic psy-
chology, which at that time consisted mostly of psychophysics and animal
conditioning. In the first place, as I have said, Murr was vitally interested
in persons, intent on understanding each of them as a unit operating in his
or her environment. And then, coming from medicine, he was at first espe-
cially attentive to abnormalities of functioning, the psychoneuroses, no suf-
ficient explanations of which are possible (as he learnt from Dr. Prince
and from all breeds of psychoanalysts) without the concept of unconscious
psychic processes. Believing in addition (against the sturdy opposition of Dr.
Prince) that Freud's theoretical system was more applicable than any other
to an understanding of dysfunctionings, M urr became one of the founders
of the Boston Psychoanalytical Society, went through the then-existing course
of formal Freudian training, including an analysis by Dr. Franz Alexander
(described in Auto. 1) and several control analyses supervised by Dr. Sachs,
and for a number of years practised orthodox psychoanalysis, modified by
ideas derived from Jung, Adler, and Rank. These were the activities which
incurred the disapproval of Karl Lashley and through him of President
Conant, whose inclination to fire Murr was eventually overruled by various
considerations advanced by Gordon Allport, Whitehead, and several other
brave supporters.
As time went on, Murr became more interested in normal than in ab-
normal personalities, partly because there was no existing theoretical system
which was anywhere near as applicable to the representation and under-
standing of the activities and achievements of healthy and supernormal
human beings as the Freudian system was in dealing with the fears, fixa-
tions, and regressions of neurotics. As a starting point, Murr turned to what
seemed most self-evident to him, in the light of common human experience,
namely, that the most critical of all the variables involved in the determina-
tion of situational reactions and proactions was the nature of the goal-directed
motive force (the subject's needful aim). As it happened at that juncture,
this concept was not acceptable to the leading lights of Murr's department.
McDougall, who had called the motive force "instinct," had been knocked
out of the ring by Watson, and the triumphant champion had managed to
persuade the brethren that they could get along without this imperceptible
energizing and orienting factor. Watson's proposal to limit the science of psy-
chology to concepts that pointed only to perceptibles struck the former bio-
chemist-all of whose critical concepts had referred to imperceptibles-as a
naive, juvenile perversity, even though it succeeded in rescuing psychology
from the meanderings of the traditional form of introspectionism. A budding
psychologist who was devoting fruitful hours listening to reports of the on-
going stream of consciousness-dreams, fantasies, memories, feelings, and
thoughts-of other people (experiential psychology, as Murr would call it)
HENRY A. MURRAY 293

could scarcely have been disposed to adopt with zest the dogmas of those
whose avowed conscious purpose was to convince us that consciousness and
purpose were nonexistent, or-considering that life is short and the art long-
to pay close attention to the latest advances in psychophysics. William James
(who was said by a later member of the Harvard department to have done
unparalleled harm to psychology) had become one of Murr's major exem-
plars by that time, and the young man found himself agreeing with almost
everything his hero had to say-completely, for example, with the heretical
statement that "Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feel-
ing, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world
in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events
happen and how work is actually done." (James, 1903, p. 501)
This idea that the "real facts" are to be found not on the surface of
the body nor in the full light of consciousness, but in the darker, blinder
recesses of the psyche was of course anathema to the majority of academic
psychologists who were militantly engaged in a competitive endeavor to
mould psychology in the image of physics, a competition in which positive
reinforcements would be reserved for those who could bring forth experi-
mental findings with the highest degree of face-validity, statistical signifi-
cance, and verifiability in all cases, obtained by the most reliable and precise
methods. To be among the leaders in this race it was necessary to legislate
against the "blinder strata," to keep away from those events which intel-
lectuals at large assumed to be the subject matter of psychology, to disregard
individual and typological differences, and to approximate universality and
certainty by measuring the lawful relationships of narrowly restricted forms
of animal behavior, of physiological processes in general, and of the simplest
sensory and sensorimotor processes of human beings in particular. In short,
methodological excellence was dictating (more than it did in any other sci-
ence) the phenomena to be investigated, with the result that in those days
psychologists were not the experts to be consulted about problems involving
varieties of human nature, as biochemists, botanists, and ornithologists, for
example, are consulted about problems involving varieties of chemicals,
plants, and birds. On this general issue Murr, at variance with his contem-
poraries, was facing in the opposite direction with the hope of devising the
best possible methods for the investigation of obscure phenomena, realizing
that it is the part of an educated man, as Aristotle said, to know what de-
gree of precision is appropriate at each stage in the development of each
discipline. Although, for various reasons, M urr did not attempt any direct
exposures of the blinder strata of feelings, he would in due course find ways
of eliciting feelingful imagery and fantasies from which one could infer the
nature of some of the components of the blinder strata.
The chief determinants of all these eccentricities of Murr have been
listed in the previous section. What remains to be presented here are the
reasons why it took no courage on his part to stick to views which were
294 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

diametrically opposed to those that were winning all the prizes: (1) Having
been trained in a more exact science, he did not feel compelled for the sake
of self-esteem to put exemplary technical competence in a less exact science
at the top of his hierarchy of aims. (2) He had come to psychology with
the hope of advancing current knowledge about human beings, not to raise
his status on the totem pole of scientists. (3) There was nothing original
about his ideas: they were derived from a score of world-famous medical
psychologists whose practical aims had kept them far closer to the raw facts
than occupants of the groves of academe had ever got. (4) Murr's varied,
intimate relations with hospital patients, ranging from a notorious gangster
and dope-addict to a champion world politician with infantile paralysis, to-
gether with privately-experienced emotional revolutions, upsurges from below
consciousness, had given him a sense of functional fitness, the feeling that
all parts of his self were in unison with his professional identity as he de-
fined it, and that he was more advantaged in these ways than were many
of the book-made academics who talked as if they had lost contact with the
springs of their own natures. (5) Despite his obnoxious behavior now and
then (after Dr. Prince retired and Murr took over the running of the Clinic),
the permanent members of the department, Professor Boring and Professor
Pratt, were invariably friendly, helpful, and indulgent: they included him
in all official and unofficial gatherings, yet let him go his independent way
uncriticized, except for a rare paternal hint, such as the warning after he
had written one of his first papers, "Psychology and the University," that if
he published it he would be persona non grata in the APA. (6) He was not
much of a teacher, but because of the drawing power of psychoanalysis he
was reinforced from the beginning of his career by having a number of
promising graduate students-such as Donald MacKinnon, Saul Rosenzweig,
Nevitt Sanford, Isabelle Kendig, Kenneth Diven, and Robert White-come
his way to get their Ph.Di's, (7) He was not tempted to toe the line of re-
warded theories and experiments, as some others were, by economic need
or even by any continuing, unrealistic want for recognition from the elite
of his profession. (The reward of tenure, for example, was not granted until
he had arrived at the seldom-equaled, late age of fifty-five.) The scientific
reference group whose standards had shaped his aspirations in the past-
composed of men who were both specialists and generalists, such as his
teachers and good friends L. J. Henderson, Hans Zinnser, Raymond Pearl,
and others I have mentioned-was now marginal to the line of his vision,
and at the focus there were no equivalent replacements, except perhaps the
next generation or a shadowy posterity, because I am sure that Murr was
confident that the ideas and values he supported were slanted toward an
allied future.
In due course the practice of introspection and the concept of motive
force, in altered forms and disguised by fresh labels, surreptitiously regained
their lost respectability; and after World War II, Freudian theory in toto
HENRY A. MURRAY 295
overran large areas of American psychology as Napoleon overran Europe.
In short, much that was pretty generally tabooed in academic circles be-
tween 1926 and 1936-the ideas and practices that gave Murr the brand of
a dispensable eccentric on the Harvard faculty-became popular common-
places within a single generation, things to be taught in general education
courses, and, as a consequence of this cultural expansion, Murr found him-
self occupying a position of discomforting respectability. He was not the real
McCoy, however, because of his conception of his role as that of an unsta-
tistical naturalist and differentiating generalist who believed that all members
of the human species were not birds of the same feather.

FLASH-BACK

Apologia. The corrective maxim dictated that no space be devoted to

an account of the parents and the childhood of my subject because there
is nothing back there that qualifies as an aid to our understanding of his
mind when it came to wrestling with the problems of psychology. In his
twenties, so far as I can see, Murr's headpiece was like the island of Nan-
tucket, standing off shore, "all beach, without a background." But, sad to
say, the protests of the caucus of friends who frequent my boardinghouse
drowned out the feeble voice of conscience and pressured me to cancel the
corrective maxim for the nonce. And so, with suppressed scruples, I shall
offer some passages extracted from the autobiography that Murr wrote in
performing the first task in the usual order of assessment procedures. Here
is his potpourri of sheer facts dished out for those who have a taste for them.
Parents. "My father was a Scot, born near Melbourne, Australia, where
his father, a British Army officer, was sent and stationed until he died a
few years after his fourth son's birth. This son, my father, was about nine
when he and his mother rounded the tempestuous Cape in a schooner, with
cascades of ocean pouring into their cabin, and eventually arrived in Eng-
land as destitute relatives of some studbook uncles and cousins who were
not inclined to be disturbed beyond using their influence to get my father
entered at the famous "bluecoat" charity school in London, Christ's Hos-
pital, where Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb had studied. And so, to keep
the home pot boiling, my grandm9ther-who was equipped with French and
Irish genes as well as British-called on whatever talents for artistic com-
positions she could muster. In view of the attractive portrait by her brush
that I now have in my possession, I shall gladly ascribe to her the honor of
the A's in drawing I received in primary school. As for the uninspired novels
of the then-current feminine brand which she managed to get published
(one entitled Ella Norman, or a Lady's Perils), the genetical potential for
creative writing they exhibit could not have been enough to count for any-
thing in lat-er generations.
"After his mother's premature death my father, a penniless orphan
296 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

without a college education, came by way of Toronto to New York City. His
anonymous arrival must have been as different as it could have been from
that of his great-grandfather, the flamboyant and irascible Earl of Dunmore,
who a hundred years earlier, being sent there to serve as Governor of the
State, seems to have done more than he should have done to antagonize
the citizens of Manhattan and was soon removed to become the last Royal
Governor of Virginia, where he lived in that grand mansion at Williamsburg
which we can see today in a restored state. In no obvious way resembling
this ancestor, my father came to New York as an unknown and unassuming
young man, presumably to seek his fortune, an outcome which looked du-
bious when he was given his first job cleaning ink-pots in the offices of a
stock company. Inevitably he went up as time went on, though he proved
less fortunate in making money than in making friends, and not so for-
tunate in making friends as he was in courting the liveliest of the six daugh-
ters of a highly respected merchant, president-to-be of the Mutual Life
Insurance Company, whose fortune was both ample and secure for succeed-
ing generations. My father and his bride actually lived happily ever after.
"All my mother's near ancestors were made out of English seeds trans-
ported to this country in the seventeenth century, the original American
population of them being distributed in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and
Pennsylvania; but eventually a number of their carriers converged and
united in the City of New York. On the way down from the first immigrants,
these seeds produced a doctor and jurist, his son, an Eli and Revolutionary
colonel whose mind became unhinged, a minister, a sea captain, and a score
of merchants of one sort or another, and a wife for each of them whose
merits and demerits are matters of conjecture. Of all these progenitors I was
acquainted only with my daughter-venerated grandfather, aloof toward me,
but a kindly gent whose white-bearded visage resembled God's as painted,
say, by Tintoretto. Remembering him I have been led to surmise that the
image and concept of Jahveh must have come not from the all-too-familiar
father figure, but from the more remote and lordly grandfather, the over-
ruling patriarch of the clan.
"If, as countless philosophers have held, happiness, resulting from this
or that variety of conduct, is the only state that a rational man will en-
deavor to secure, then my father was as successful as anybody I could name,
provided one correlates happiness with a continuing state of unperturbed
serenity, cheerfulness, enjoyment of sheer being, trust, and mutual affection,
or, in other words, a life of moderate, solid, predictable satisfactions, free
from choler, anxiety, guilt, and shame. In Aristotelian terms, the key to it
all was his adherence to the res media; and in William J ames' somewhat
comparable terms, the secret lay in the willingness of this man (who was no
great shakes as a businessman and banker) to renounce in good faith un-
realizable ambitions: 'With no attempt there can be no failure; with no fail-
ure no humiliation.' (James, 1950, p. 310)
HENRY A. MURRAY 297

HAs for Freud, he seems to have had no concepts at all to represent such
an unself-centered, even-tempered, unpretentious, undemanding, acquiescent,
firm yet nonauthoritarian, jolly father who is scarcely capable of a veritable
splurge of anger, even when he breaks the door down to put a stop to a
voyeuristic-exhibitionistic party of mixed doubles initiated by his little daugh-
ter and her younger brother. Anyhow, in the analysis of my life's course
conducted by Dr. Alexander, no indications of any hidden resentment against
my father nor any memories of a persisting rage-reaction-following, say, one
of the two just spankings I received from him-were ever brought to light.
In short, so far as I recall, my father, though not installed as a charismatic
hero, was always a positive univalent figure in my mind, a dependable guide
and teacher in the Hellenic mode, rather than a threatening, awesome, high
and mighty judge. Consequently, in later life when I came upon Freud's
conception of the father-son side of the oedipus complex, it did not strike
home with any vibrant shock of recognition. Furthermore, in my case there
was no confirmation of the tenet that antagonisms to authority figures in
later life (several in my history) can invariably be traced to the person's
original hostility to his father.
"It was my mother who was the ambivalent parent: more often the
focus of attention, affection, and concern than my father was, year in and
year out, but also more resented now and then, mostly for correcting my
abominable manners, for nagging about minutiae, or for enforcing duties or
requesting services which interrupted my activities. Of the two, she was the
more energetic, restless, enthusiastic, enterprising, and talkative-giving us
daily reports of her personal preoccupations, her doings, encounters, worries,
and frustrations-also the more changeable, moody, and susceptible to mel-
ancholy. I resemble my mother in all but one of these respects: like my for-
tunate father, I have never been plagued by endogenous anxieties and worries,
and, like him again, I adopted at a very early age the role of physician to
these perturbations in my mother and later to comparable but slighter per-
turbations in my more rational and steady wife.
"M y mother was an effective, though over-exacting, administrator of
the household, and I'm afraid there was good ground for her imbedded feel-
ing that her unusual industry, thrift, and competence in carrying out these
functions-keeping the seven domestics busy as could be-were not duly ap-
preciated by her children, but taken for granted as the given order of nature.
My mother was even more sedulous in the performance of her role as super-
visor of the health and of the social development of her three children more
than three years apart in age: a fascinating, mischievous daughter with
Hashes of ungovernable temper, followed by two more-easily manageable
sons, me in the middle and my brother, the cute kid, with a repertoire of
precocious tricks indicative of real brilliance in the future."
Past History, Memories. Here again I will have Murr speak for himself.
But since he cannot recall his birth, nor anything of his sojourn in the
298 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

maternal claustrum, nor earlier when the particles that made him were lo-
cated in two places, neither one of these in heaven, it is up to me to an-
nounce that on May 13, 1893, in a brownstone residence, where nowadays
the Rockefeller Center's sky-assaulting piles of concrete blocks irreverently
stand, the little cherub, trailing humors of the original sin of selfishness,
came from darkness into light in a shorter time, I wager, than it has taken
me to reach this beginning of his life. In addition let me say that this was
the location in New York City of his first and second winter homes up to
the time of his marriage at the age of twenty-three. His summers were spent
on Long Island near the seashore, with visits to boyhood friends in other
places, except for four longish trips to Europe (his father loved England,
his mother was a fervent Francophile and had her children learn French),
during the course of which Murr compliantly dragged his feet through most
of the great museums, cathedrals, and historic buildings between Naples
and the Highlands of Scotland. At home on Long Island he built sand-
fortresses and claustra of barrel-stays (his mother fantasied that he was cut out
to be an architect) until his father taught him how to swim, fish, and sail,
and later to play tennis, golf, and baseball with limited proficiency. More
enticing than those games, however, were his animals-goat, dog, and hens-
and the woods back of the house where he could climb trees, put up a
teepee, and pretend he was an Indian. He read every accessible French and
English fairy tale, all about the Knights of the Round Table, and boys'
books about animals, Indians, frontiersmen, and the American Civil War.
His father, who was steeped in the British classics, encouraged him to extend
his range to a few of the works of Scott and Dickens. But almost invariably
the greater lure was outdoor physical activity, and, on the whole, he seems
to have grown up as an average, privileged American boy of that era (be-
fore the days of automobiles, motorboats, movies, and all that), with an
identity in the eyes of his miniature social surround which could not be
captured in terms of either docile or rebellious, timid or reckless, awkward
or agile, dull or bright, hopeless or promising, in or out. He got on famously
with his younger brother but infamously with his older sister until he was
nine and had gathered up enough muscle to subdue her. Despite the ex-
perience gained in coping with this tempestuous sibling, come puberty he
was shy in his approach to girls and did not know the pangs of calf-love
until he was sixteen. In college there was a three-year period of devoted
courtship of Josephine L. Rantoul of Boston before he got around to the
long-since-predetermined question and answer the day after the Harvard-
Yale boat race. Since I have already called attention to Murr's mediocre
scholarship record up to the age of twenty-two, I have only two items to add:
one, that no bona fide intellectual ever crossed the threshold of his home,
and two, that his parents were Episcopalians and Republicans, his father
being a great admirer of Disraeli, his character, his policies, and his novels.
So much as a prelude to the memories that follow. Here is Murr speaking.
HENRY A. MURRAY 299
"The Marrow of My Being. Memory (about four years of age): Absorbed
in looking at a fairy-book picture of a sad-faced queen sitting with her sad-
faced son, I learn from my mother that it is the prospect of death that has
made them sad. Translated briefly into today's words, my melancholy feelings
and thoughts were of this nature: 'death .... sad for the queen if her son
is going to die, sad for the son if his mother is going to die . . . pitiful that
this must be and nothing can be done about it.' My present free associations,
starting from this first recalled encounter with the idea of death and its sever-
ance of affectional bonds between mother and son, have carried me back in
time to a few items which suggest that one crucial affectional bond between
mother and child had already been severed: (i) the fact that I was abruptly
weaned at two months because my mother, for some reason, was too upset to
continue nursing me (the possibility that sucking interfered with breathing
and that I 'fought' the stifling breast as some infants do to the great discom-
fort of their mothers), (ii) the fact that I was a feeding problem for a year
or more and in my earliest photograph look decidedly undernourished and
forlorn, and (iii) the fact that my mother was at most times far more occupied
with my older sister, her favorite child however troublesome, and at this time
was especially occupied with my cunning baby brother. These facts and a
score of other consonant filaments from the remembered past have led me
to the following hypothetical Chronology of Events: Quite a while before the
traditional oedipus hunting season, that infant had come to the grievous (and
valid) realization that he could count on only a limited, third-best portion of
his mother's love; and since his spectacles of hypersensitive grief and his
petitions for an ample supply of reassuring consolation-such as his tearfully
saying, 'you make my feelings hurt me' -since these led only to frustration
and shame, he proudly withdrew, with some of the murderous resentment
of an abandoned child ('you'll be sorry if I die'), into a private, maternal-like
claustrum of his own making, where, bathed in narcissistic self-pity for a
while, he could lick his own wounds until nature healed them. In this way,
that special bond of mutual affinity, which depends, in an extremity, on a
child's need to receive and his mother's capacity to bestow a sufficiency of
emotional nurturance, was forever severed; in this one respect they were now
dead to each other, an outcome which was, once in a while, tragically expe-
rienced by the child (as in the memory ), despite his early gain in emotional
self-sufficiency (,I can get along without you') and in venturesome autonomy,
coupled with the repression of the residues of suffering, the abatement of his
resentment, and the displacement of pity from the self to some sufferer in
his environment. Needless to say the pitied sufferer was none other than his
mother who took to her couch periodically with a sick headache, and, being
given to understand that if he made a noise or misbehaved in any way, his
mother's headache would become unbearable ('you'll be sorry if I die'), pity
soon became one of the most influential ingredients of his conscience. This
reversal of roles was vividly illustrated in the one really astonishing (and un-
300 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

interpreted) dream I had in my analysis with Dr. Alexander: I was comfort-

ing my mother in my arms as if she were a baby, while she was vomiting over
my left shoulder. All this is susceptible to a great deal more analysis; but let
this much suffice because the determinants of this complex are of less interest
than some of its Consequences. These included (i) a marrow of misery and
melancholy repressed by pride and practically extinguished in everyday life
by a counteracting disposition of sanguine and expansive buoyancy [described
in the Prologue]; (ii) a profound attraction, coming from the marrow, for
tragic themes in literature, which drew me to Herman Melville, Shakespeare,
and other authors (the saddest of all circumstances being the loss of a beloved
person), and incidentally disposed me to select many gloomy pictures for the
TAT; (iii) also coming from the marrow, an affinity for the darker, blinder
strata of feeling (as mentioned in connection with William James), this being
a representative of the feminine component of my nature which, evoked by
art, was influential in converting me to psychology; (iv ) for some thirty years
of my life, also coming from the marrow, a hypersensitivity to the sufferings
of other individuals, especially women, which inclined me towards medicine
and psychotherapy with the sanguine confidence that I could restore their
health and joy; (v) coming out of pride, denial, and repression, the convic-
tion that I could get along well enough with a minimum amount of aid, sup-
port, appreciation, recognition, or consolation from others; anyhow, I could
never depend on it and should never seek it; in solitude and privacy I could
be happily independent of all that; (vi) the (unnoticed) concept of inviolacy
in Explorations; (vii) the concept of nurturance, of receiving and transmitting
it; and finally (viii) later when new ideas began bubbling autonomously in
my head, these became the foci of my nurturant disposition and there was not
much energy left over for the miseries of others.
"Nansen and the Exploration of Remote, Unknown, and Unspoiled
Regions of Nature, Solitude and Pantheism. Memory (3.8 years of age):
Pacing back and forth one evening in the presence of my parents and saying
that I would not go to bed until they promised to give my (one-month-old)
brother the name of Nansen. Explanation: A few days earlier my parents
told me about a lecture at the Metropolitan Opera House by Nansen, the
arctic explorer, and this, together with a fine picture of him in the newspaper,
was enough to get his figure immediately established as my first grand hero,
having been prepared by Robinson Crusoe to be captivated by this chance
encounter with a venturer into unstaked territory. Consequences: (i) choos-
ing Nansen's Farthest North, in two volumes, as the first book to read alone
from cover to cover; (ii) incorporating later generations of similar exemplars
-American Indians, pioneers, woodsmen, explorers, mountain climbers-
whose wilderness achievements depended on know-how, endurance, and
fortitude; (iii) positive cathection, with pantheistic fervor, of the more remote,
less frequented and unspoiled regions of nature, resulting in the development
of a major territorial system of my personality exemplified by camping, fish-
HENRY A. MURRAY 301

ing, and hunting trips in the Adirondacks, New Mexico, California, Oregon,
British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfound-
land, the traverse of Mt. Blanc from the Italian side, and the building of soli-
tary hide-outs, here and there, at some distance from 'the madding crowd';
and (iv) a psyche prepared by empathic communions with nature-receiving
impressions 'fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast'-to
appreciate nature poetry, the writings of Herman Melville, and the earth,
animal, and sky mythologies of our earliest ancestors (closed books to city-
dwelling theorists); and on the other hand, prepared to detest all the land-
scape horrors of commercial advertising. Later consequences: (i) the replace-
ment of alluring geographical territories by the more enticing, primitive,
mysterious, and unsurveyed regions of the psyche (explorations of person-
ality); (ii) a miniature of nature in the form of a garden next to each of the
four Clinic buildings we inhabited; and (iii) the concepts of egression, in-
gression, ascension, descension, and so forth to represent movements in social
and cultural space as well as in territorial space.
"A Sensori-motor Defect. Memory (nine years old): Returning from
school innocent as could be one day to find the dining room transformed into
an operating room, with two white-gowned surgeons and an anaesthetist
awaiting my arrival, and my mother confronting me with the option of a
pain-eliminating general anaesthetic or an aquarium as prize for getting on
without it. Explanation: Four years earlier, my mother, ever on the lookout
for deviations from the norm, detected a slight crossing of my eyes (internal
strabismus) which became steadily more accentuated despite the therapeutic
efforts of New York's most eminent ophthalmologist, and so now the time
had come for this worthy to cut some of the hyperactive orbital muscles. Con-
sequences: Although I was pleasured by an aquarium of enchanting fish, it
turned out that I had been somewhat disadvantaged by the expert surgeon's
having cut a few more muscle fibers than was necessary to correct the cross-
ing of my vision, and I came forth with the opposite defect, an external
strabismus, which, though far less obvious than the previous condition, left
me nonetheless as incapable as ever of focusing on a single point with more
than one eye at a time, and hence incapable of stereoscopic vision. But I was
entirely unconscious of the significance of this defect until as a medical stu-
dent I went to the office of Dr. Smith Ely Jeliffe, a spectacular New York
psychiatrist, to consult him about my stuttering which had set in shortly after
the operation. To my amazement, Dr. Jeliffe's first question was: 'Have you
found any difficulty in playing games, such as baseball, tennis, or squash,
which necessitate catching or hitting a fast moving ball?' 'Yes, I certainly
have,' I said, 'but how did you know?' 'Well,' Dr. Jeliffe replied, 'I noticed
that one eye was not looking at me directly but turned out a bit, and that
would be enough to unfit you for games of that sort and also for swift, precise
manual movements.' The doctor's astonishing powers of observation and of
inference succeeded in casting a penetrating ray of illumination into uprush-
 302 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ing memories of humiliating incidents, particularly in baseball games, when

I had struck out or let an easy one slip through my fingers, and so forth and
so forth. Dr. Jeliffe went on to relate this elementary sensori-motor defect to
my stuttering, but whatever wisdom he had to offer on that issue has long-
since passed beyond recall. Today I am partial to the notion that a primary
suffocation experience which, as mentioned earlier, involves a panicky inco-
ordination of sucking, breathing, an in turned eye, and hands lunging at the
breast could have established a predisposition to all three of the disabilities I
have mentioned. But to return to Dr. Jeliffe's office, what surprises me now is
that it never occurred to me that the revelation I had been vouchsafed had
any bearing on my intention to become a surgeon; and it was not until three
years later that the realization that my manual dexterity was definitely limited
became clear enough to fortify my decision to devote myself exclusively to
research."
Murr is so convinced that personality is revealed only vaguely in the
empty abstractions derived from questionnaires and factor analyses, but sub-
stantially in the minute, concrete details of critical and typical episodes in the
life history of an individual, that even after deleting most of the detail in the
three memories I have offered you, I find that these have already usurped
more than the allotted space. Consequently, instead of allowing him to go on
in this fashion, I shall give the bare gist of three of the last dozen clusters
of memories that he submitted. (I) A non-Freudian child. Murr tells of Dr.
Alexander's boredom when his analysand, despite continuous scratching at
his unconscious, failed to bring forth the expected array of polymorphic epi-
sodes. With the advent of passionate love in post-adolescence, Murr exultantly
experienced and reciprocally expressed, as related in one of his papers, pretty
nearly every Freudian component of the sex instinct, showing that none of
these dispositions were absent in his constitution, and, incidentally, that
Freud erred in affirming that men of our civilization are necessarily doomed
to renunciation and incurable discontent. But, except for a few banal uni-
versals, there were no veritable exhibitions of these tendencies in his early
dreams and memories, either, perhaps, because of the rarity in his protected
environment of suitable stimulations and opportunities, or perhaps because
of a too-firmly established barrier of repression. (2) Possibly an Adlerian boy.
Freud's theories are consistent with a concept of the child as an armless and
legless torso and head, with three cathected orifices in constant need of stimu-
lation, a concept which offered Murr another possible reason for his failure
to qualify as a typical Freudian child. Perhaps the locomotive and manipula-
tive activity of his appendages were functionally more important to him than
the superficial sensitivity of the orifices per se. Anyhow, from nine to eighteen,
football heroes (which excluded his father) and playing football were at the
top of his system of values, which suggests that an Adlerian factor was at
work, because he, a confirmed stutterer, always played quarterback-not too
well, but he persisted and, for some reason, never stuttered when he gave the
 HENRY A. MURRAY 303
signals. Another Adlerian story that MUff related with some pride was of
being licked in a fight during recess at primary school and then taking Up
boxing until he won the featherweight championship. (3) Egression from the
husk of his youth. MUff had been brought up on the conservative Republican
Episcopalian side of the traditions of a relatively stable society, with a moral
code, cluster of tastes, and privileged status that were taken for granted by
his parents and unobtrusively exemplified. Molded by these values, which
had been reinforced by the Rev. Endicott Peabody of Groton, Murr arrived
at medical school, not suspecting that in due course his analytical mind would
identify their ethnocentric determinants, and that before he graduated he
would refute a basic Marxian theorem by saying good-bye to his implanted
prejudices in favor of Christianity, the Republican Party, and the class of
people with whom he had been reared. Foremost among his redeemers was
a brilliant classmate, Alvan Barach, his first intimate (and life-long) Jewish
friend, who was headed for a distinguished career as a practitioner and scien-
tific innovator. MUff had chosen to go to the P & S in New York with the
express purpose of detaching himself from his playboy and athletic friends
in the Harvard-Boston area; but the separation that was intended to be tempo-
rary turned out to be a permanent divorce of interests and viewpoints with
no remaining valid bridges of communication. But not so in his own family,
since they had found a way of getting along happily together, all talking at
the same time, without more than an occasional reference to basic issues.

MURR' S ACCOMPLISHMENTS

1\1urr is known here and there in professional circles as an imprecision

instrument maker because of his part in the fashioning of the Thematic Ap-
perception Test (1935), and as a theorist because of his part in the building
of the edifice of principles, concepts, methods, case material, and experiments
entitled Explorations in Personality (1938). And here let me immediately
record that in Murr's opinion the major determinant of the volume, quality,
and pre-timeliness of that cooperative book was the exceptional spirit, charac-
ter, competence, and imaginative scope of the students and colleagues who
worked in companionship with him at the Harvard Psychological Clinic from
1934 through 1936. In Auto. 2 Murr gratefully named each member of that
body and of later bodies of congenial and talented collaborators (some forty
in all), so many of whom went on to surpass him, each in his own way as a
productive contributor to the science of psychology, that, in some quarters,
Murr is thought of not as an author so much as an author of authors, a diver-
sityof them, none bound to his ideas.
MUff, with modesty in abeyance, is disposed to claim more than half the
credit for the following endeavors to advance the science of human nature in
1938: Methodological: the multiform system of assessment, the more practical
part of which consists of multifarious procedures administered by multifarious
 304 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

specialists to each of a number of subjects, followed by staff meetings in which

the data obtained from one assessee is presented, discussed, interpreted, and
organized (by an appointed personographer ) into an explanatory formulation
of the history of that assessee's personality. The general design of this system
of operations was determined by a mere transfer of learning from medicine
to psychology, with the crucial difference that the terminal process is not sim-
ply the assignment of each subject to a known diagnostic category, as it com-
monly is in medicine, but a novel, creative composition (consisting of univer-
sal, typological, and unique features) the validity of which is susceptible to
judgments in terms of various criteria. These lengthy personographies based
on data obtained from some forty procedures and revised to take account of
the diverse judgments of other generalist-assessors canceled for Murr all fur-
ther confidence in the rating of any variable by a single test or in the repre-
sentation of a personality by a list of traits or, indeed, in any representation
(except a truly creative one) that has escaped exposure to a variety of in-
sights. But the point, overlooked by most readers, is that the superordinate
purpose of these assessment procedures, repeated in modified versions with
other assemblages of subjects, is to permit the periodic exemplification, test-
ing, correction, expansion, and reconstruction (and hence the continuous
evolution) of a personological system of concepts and theories. (2) Technical:
special methods several of which, like the TAT (better named "eductors"
than "projection tests"), were designed to educe (draw forth) words, sen-
tences, or stories as ground for verifiable or plausible inferences in regard to
influential components of the personality which the subject is either unable
or unwilling to report. (3) Synthetical: the incorporation into the sphere of
academic concern of a large portion of Freud's theoretical system integrated
with contributions from Jung, Adler, l\1cDougall, Lewin, and others. (4)
Conceptual: (i) the first version of a reasonably comprehensive classification
of aimed motive forces (needs, wants, drives) as a necessary revision and ex-
tension of Freud's irrational, sentimental, and inadequately differentiated
division of instincts into Eros and Thanatos, and so forth; (ii) the first version
of a classification of the salient properties of the "behavioral environment"
(Koffka, Lewin) into varieties of press, and (iii) a number of concepts which
define different dynamic relationships between needs and between needs and
press. The chief determinant of these taxonomic endeavors was merely a trans-
fer of learning from chemistry, medicine, and the biological sciences, all of
which were launched on their careers as differentiated systems of knowledge
by extensive classifications of the entities and phenomena that lay within the
circumference of their responsibility.
The absence in Explorations of any clearly stated, testable propositions
contributed by M urr is definitely to his discredit, as Hall and Lindzey have
properly pointed out. Of little weight in his defense would be the observation
that here and there are passages expressive of tacit propositions which could
easily be made explicit, and many of these could be ordered in relation to
HENRY A. MURRAY 305
one theme: the various components of personality (such as interests, emo-
tions, needs, sentiments, defenses, and past experiences) that operate as de-
terminants or modifiers of a person's apprehensions (perceptions, estimations,
interpretations, predictions, recollections, conceptualizations, and theoretical
explanations) of observed phenomena. Another factor to be considered in this
connection is Murr's perverse antipathy to any odor of scientific pretentious-
ness, any greater methodological refinements than the nature of the data war-
rants, having too often been a witness of a mountain of ritual bringing forth
a mouse of fact more dead than alive. To me this perversity in Murr looks
like a wilful addiction to foreseeable negative reinforcements.
After editing the manuscript of Explorations for delivery to the Oxford
University Press (whose consultant argued strongly for rejection), l\1urr left
for an official absence from Harvard that would extend over nine of the sub-
sequent eleven years. The first among other things he did was to sojourn and
travel in Europe with his wife and daughter Josephine (who was destined
to become a pediatrician). They travelled in Germany, where in 1937 they
saw the frenzied Hitler and noted with horrible forebodings the unmistak-
able premonitory signs of a collective Faustian explosion, then in Switzerland,
where they visited Dr. Jung at his Bollingen retreat and listened to his analy-
sis of Hitler's syndrome of symptoms, and finally in Hungary and Austria,
where he spent a memorable evening with Dr. and Anna Freud in the room
where that astounding corpus of cultural history had been shaped. Four years
later, in the fall of 1941, when Murr returned to his cherished workshop in
Cambridge-succinctly described in his day as "wisteria outside, hysteria in-
side," but now progressing on a saner course under the steadier and more
competent directorship of the beloved Robert White-he was greeted by the
largest and liveliest group of knowledgeable and diversified investigators that
had ever gathered there or ever would. Some of these men-Leo Bellak, Elliott
Jaques, Silvan Tomkins, Frederick Wyatt and others-were prepared to en-
gage in the multiform assessment of another aggregate of subjects, but this
time with an expanded and improved conceptual system and an elegant statis-
tical design composed by Daniel Horn. There was promise of a considerable
advance in both methodology and theory; but Pearl Harbor and its conse-
quences for the staff brought the whole program to a halt after the thorough
study of only eleven subjects. Only some of the gathered data were salvaged
for publication, some by White, Robert Holt, and others, and some by Murr
and Christiana Morgan in a monograph entitled "A Clinical Study of Senti-
ments" (values), which, finished under pressure amid wartime duties, failed,
by an inexcusable oversight, to mention the names of the numerous collabora-
tors to whom they were unequivocally indebted. Between 1943 and 1948
Murr was primarily engaged in the operations of the OSS Assessment Staff,
in company with several of his former colleagues, James C. Miller, Morris
Stein, and a few previously mentioned, especially Donald MacKinnon, able di-
rector of the main assessment station near Washington (not to speak of almost
306 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

fifty other "behavioral scientists"). After the war was over Murr was busy
with some of the chapters of Assessment of Men (1948), which contains a
full account of the exciting history and ambiguous results of that wholly
absorbing world-wide enterprise. Finally, before returning to Harvard Murr
wrote a l00-page introduction to Melville's bizarre yet profound Pierre (1949)
and several other pieces.
From 1950 to 1962 Murr was in charge of grants from foundations and
from the government (NIH) which covered the expenses of four successive
assessment programs, each consisting of a three-year examination and analysis
of the performances in testing situations and in experiments of twenty or
more Harvard undergraduates. One result of all of these endeavors was a
collection of eighty-eight copious case histories (including in all about 4,000
story compositions), teeming with grist for whoever has the time, bent, and
capability to make scientific sense of it. Of the many collaborators in these
projects, some (to whom Murr is especially grateful and indebted)-starting
with the dynamo of 1950, the disciplined and effective Gardner Lindzey, and
ending with the dynamo of 1962, the contagiously zestful and productive Ed
Shneidman (not to speak of many other wonders, such as Gerhard Nielsen
of Copenhagen, in berween i=are already notable for their accomplishments
along the way; but, except for a sketch of the icarian personality and an article
on the heart rate in stressful dyadic disputations, Murr's bibliography is mute
as regards all the grain-full information garnered in those years, and unless
he has something creditable to exhibit in his sections of the cooperative vol-
ume with which he is currently involved (to be entitled Aspects of Person-
ality), there will be no substantial accomplishments to record for those twelve
years of industrious activity.
One determinant of the barrenness of Murr's record in the sphere of
personological research after World War II was the spontaneous propulsion
of his thoughts by the sanguine surplus into other, continuously expanding
regions of concern. For ten years or more he and his wife would rise at 4: 30
A.M., and by 5 Murr was at his desk ready to set down the bubblings of
images and ideas which would invariably invade his stream of consciousness,
sometimes in league with a set task but more often not. One of the main
regions of concern was one which might be called the world's dilemma. The
OSS assessment job had taken Murr around the world to check up on the
errors they had made, and he happened to be in Kunming, testing officer
candidates for the Chinese Nationalist army, when the news of Hiroshima,
announced over the radio of his jeep, set off a hectic procession of horrendous
images of the world's fate, which ever since have magnetically directed the
path of countless currents of imagination toward some far-off ultimate solu-
tion, in the constant view of which, year by year and month by month, short-
range international strategies and tactics could be more creatively designed.
While others were thinking of ways of reducing momentary tensions and
HENRY A. MURRAY 307
quieting the anxieties of their fellow citizens, Murr was oriented toward the
total abolition of war. Peace must be insured by a world government of an
unprecedented type, which would never be established or never last without
a radical transformation of ethnocentric sentiments and values on both sides
of our divided world; and a transformation of this nature would never occur
without some degree of synthesis of the best features of the two opposing
cultural systems; and this would not take place creatively except in sight of
an unprecedented vision and conception of world relationship and fellowship,
a kind of superordinate natural religion, or mythologized philosophy. This
line of thinking, which brought MUIr to a consideration of the determinants
of the genesis and history of Judaeo-Christianity, issued in a number of papers
listed in the bibliography.
Murr's other absorbing region of concern contained potential constitu-
ents for a basic revision and expansion of his theoretical system. It is impos-
sible to summarize 2000 pages of diagrams, notes, and scribblings; but to
deprive those voyages of thought of a little of their strangeness, let me just
mention a few of the incorporated components that can be readily identi-
fied: (1) Keith's group theory of evolution; (2) role theory which Murr, as a
member of the newly formed Department of Social Relations, learnt from
Talcott Parsons in conjunction with much that he received from Clyde
Kluckhohn regarding the pervasive inllucnce of culture; (3) general systems
theory, the abstract essence of which Murr derived from Whitehead; (4)
adoption of the on-going processes of metabolism (the anabolic composition,
Co, and the catabolic decomposition, De, of energy-binding substances) as the
sine qua non of the givenness of life, the source of psychic energy (psycho-
metabolism), and the core (with additional variables) of his basic paradigm
for a host of analogous phenomena at different levels; (5) the application of
this paradigm to the problem of the genesis of life from non-life, to the theory
of the creative (emergent) evolution of genetical systems, to the life cycle of
a single individual, and to the compositional activities of the mind, and so
forth, and so forth. A little of all this was included in Auto. 2, which Murr
wrote for Sigmund Koch, but not enough to give any of the more recent
expositors of contemporary theories of personality the impression that Murr
had inched his thoughts a measurable distance beyond their original positions
some thirty years ago.
Anyhow, the impression he has given others of a stationary mental ap-
paratus is not very likely to be corrected. After being vouchsafed an extremely
happy and full-freighted life, with a few trough and many peak experiences,
he was confounded in 1962, on the one hand, by the sudden death of his
superlatively good and loyal wife, and, on the other, by the fading of the
mental energies on which he had been counting to deal with one or two at
least of the ten half-finished books that are calling for completion, residual
products of his sanguine surplus.
308 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

EPILOGUE
I told you at the start of this case portrait that my functionally autono-
mous will, the conscious governor of my ego system (the little self) had re-
solved to check the incontinence of the sanguine surplus from the larger Self
and adhere to the corrective maxim. But it must have been apparent to you
almost from the start that although I was managing to focus pretty well on
the eccentricities of MUff, there was more functional autonomy in the Self
than in the self: the legs of the portrait carne out too long and lanky, the belly
of childhood memories was too bloated, and I had hardly stretched above the
eyebrows when I found myself simultaneously at both the ordained space
limit and the time limit. Down came the blade of the editor's guillotine, and
my last section, the forehead and crown of the portrait, which contained what-
ever retrospective bits of wit and wisdom MUff could muster, rolled into the
basket with a thud. In short, I need not have taken a paragraph of the pro-
logue to describe the sanguine surplus, because it was fated to make a dis-
astrous spectacle of itself in the ensuing pages, and to leave Murr and myself,
the viewed and the viewer, with one residual query: Would I not have been
capable of contributing more substantially to my profession if that eminent
ophthalmologist had left my right eye focusing on something just beyond my
nose which I could seize and scientifically contain in the hollow of one hand,
instead of allowing his own sanguine surplus to take hold of his scalpel and
send me off with a right eye that was bound to wander, joyfully but waste-
fully, beyond the standard circumference of healthy vision?

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Henry A. Murray
Autobiographical and Theoretical
What should psychologists do about psychoanalysis? J. abnorm. soc. Psycho!., 1950,
35, 150-175. (Auto. 1)
Preparations for the scaffold of a comprehensive system. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psy-
chology: a study of a science, vol. 3. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. (Auto. 2)
Theoretical
(with staff) Explorations in personality. New York: Oxford, 1938.
(with C. D. Morgan) A clinical study of sentiments. (ch. II) Genet. Psychol.
Monogr., 1945, 32, 3-311.
Toward a classification of interactions. In T. Parsons, E. A. Shils, E. C. Tolman,
et al. (Eds.) Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard,
1951.
(with C. Kluckhohn) Outline of a conception of personality, and Personality
formation: the determinants. In C. Kluckhohn, H. A. Murray, and D. M.
 HENRY A. MURRAY 309
Schneider (Eds.), Personality in nature, society, and culture. New York: Knopf,
1953.
Drive, time, strategy, measurement, and our way of life. In C. Lindzey (Ed.),
Assessment of human motives. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958.

Methodology and Methods

(in addition to Explorations in personality and A clinical study of sentiments, ch.
III)
(with C. D. Morgan) A method of investigating fantasies. Arch. neurol. Psychiat.,
1935, 34, 289-306. Reprinted in R. C. Birney and R. C. Teevan (Eds.),
Measuring human motivation. Princeton: Van Nostrand. 1962.
Principles of assessment. In H. A. Murray, D. W. MacKinnon, J. C' Miller,
D. W. Fiske, & E. Hanfmann, Assessment of men. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1948.
(with A. Davids) "Preliminary appraisal of an auditory projective technique for
studying personality and cognition. Amer. J. Orthopsychiat., 1955, 25, 543-
554.
Introduction. In G. G. Stern, M. I. Stein, & B. S. Bloom, Methods in personality
assessment. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956.
Historical trends in personality research. In H. P. David & J. C. Brengelmann
(Eds.), Perspectives in personality research. New York: Springer, 1960.

Research and Case Studies

The effect of fear upon estimates of the maliciousness of other personalities.
J. Psychol., 1933, 4, 310-329.
(with H. A. Wolff & C. E. Smith) The psychology of humor. J. abnorm. soc.
Psychol., 1934,28,341-365.
The psychology of humor. II. Mirth responses to disparagement jokes as a mani-
festation of an aggressive disposition. J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1934, 29, 66-81.
(with D. R. Wheeler) A note on the possible clairvoyance of dreams. ]. Psychol.,
1936, 3, 309-313. (concerned with the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby)
(with C. D. Morgan) Eleven case studies (chs. IV-VII) in A clinical study of
sentiments. Gen. Psychol. Mono., 1945, 32, 3-149.
Introduction. In A. Burton & R. E. Harris (Eds.), Clinical studies in personality,
Vol. I. New York: Harper & Row, 1947.
American Icarus. In A. Burton & R. E. Harris (Eds.), Clinical studies of per-
sonality, vol. 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1955.
Notes on the Icarus syndrome. Folia psychiatrica, neurologica, et neurochirugica
Neelandica, 1958, 61, 204-208.
Studies of stressful interpersonal disputations. Amer. Psychologist, 1963, 18,
28-36.

Miscellaneous: State of Man, Evolution, Creativity, and Mythology

Individuality: the meaning and content of individuality in contemporary America.
Daedalus, 1958, 87, 25-47. Reprinted in The American style, New York,
1958; and in H. M. Ruitenbeek (Ed.), Varieties of modern social theory, New
York: Dutton, 1963.
Vicissitudes of creativity. In H. H. Anderson (Ed.), Creativity and its cultivation.
New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
310 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Beyond yesterday's idealisms. Phi Beta Kappa Oration, Harvard Chapter, 1959;
printed in C. Brinton (Ed.), The fate of man. New York: George Braziller,
1961; also in Man thinking, United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell.
Two versions of man. In H. Shapley (Ed.), Science ponders religion. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960.
The possible nature of a "mythology" to come. In H. A. Murray (Ed.), Myth
and mythmaking. New York: George Braziller, 1960.
Unprecedented evolutions. Daedalus, 1961, 90, 547-570. Reprinted in H. Hoag-
land and R. W. Burhoe (Eds.), Evolution and man's progress. New York:
Columbia, 1962.
Prospect for psychology. International Congress of Applied Psychology, Copen-
hagen, 1961. Reprinted in Science, 1962, 136, 483-488.
The personality and career of Satan. ]. soc. Issues, XVIII, 1962, 28, 36-54.
Herman Melville
Introduction with footnotes. In H. A. Murray (Ed.), Pierre or the amhiguities.
(H. Melville) New York: Farrar, Straus, Hendricks House, 1949.
In nomine diaboli. The New England Quart., 1951, XXIV, 435-452. Reprinted
in Mohy-Dick Centennial Essays, Melville Society (Ed.), 1953; also in Dis-
cussions of Mohy-Dick, M. R. Stern (Ed.), Boston, 1960; and in Melville, a
collection of critical essays, R. Chase (Ed.), New York: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Other Puhlications Cited

James, William. The varieties of religious experience. New York: Longmans,

1903.
---. The principles of psychology, vol. 1. New York: Dover, 1950.
jung, C. G. Psychological types. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1923.
 !
311 I
Sidney Leavitt Pressey
In previous volumes of Psychology in Autobiography some contributors
have made little or even no mention of their personal lives. I must be more
frank; my professional interests had origins in my youth and have continued
to relate to my own life-thus my research in gerontology was stimulated by
concern over my father's problems of aging and my own. Throughout, I have
worked with the conviction that psychology has major contributions to make
to human welfare. Now seventy-six, I can comment more freely than a
younger man about certain issues and see them in a long perspective.

NEW ENGLAND HERITAGE

Both my parents came from a little southern New Hampshire village

where their families had long lived; part of Grandfather Little's farm had
been in his family since before the Revolutionary War. My mother taught
country school, attended the New England Conservatory of Music, and
played the pipe organ in the Congregational church where Grandfather
Pressey was long a deacon. My father graduated from Williams College and
Union Theological Seminary after a struggle as regards both finances and
health, a year being spent in Colorado because of a diagnosis of incipient
tuberculosis. He thereafter served Congregational churches mostly in the
Midwest, but always returning whenever he could to visit his aging parents.
The most recurring recollections of my childhood are of this then-lovely New
England countryside and the kindly people there.
I was born December 28, 1888, in Brooklyn, New York, where my father
had his first pastorate; but since I was troubled greatly by asthma, the family
moved to Vermont and then to a little Illinois town from which (my father
suffering a sunstroke) we went to the cooler climate of St. Paul, Minnesota;
in a suburb of that city my childhood and youth were spent. There was much
illness in the little family (which included a younger sister) and anxiety
about health, also about income and tenure, though my father was among
the most successful and respected of the pastors in each community he served.
As usual in ministers' families, that service included all of us. My mother
313
314 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

kept various women's groups going. I delivered the church newsletter over
the parish, played in the Sunday school orchestra, and was handy-boy. We
might attend four church meetings a week and had always to be exemplary
in this turn-of-the-century, middle-class Puritan suburb where there was no
card playing, dancing, nor even bicycle riding on Sunday. My father was
always thinking about his work, shy, humorless, often impractical, and
moody; my mother was devoted to him and her children, liked by everyone,
the wise counselor in times of difficulty though overworked and often ailing
herself.
Like most ministers' sons, I was irked by the demands of my father's
professicn on all our lives, and I came to question the beliefs he preached.
But my adolescent idealism was impressed by the selfless commitment to his
work of both my parents. For his denomination and his time my father was
a liberal and much interested in what would now be called pastoral psychol-
ogy; he read everything he could find which might help him better under-
stand his own religious convictions and his parishioners' problems. In that
middle-class suburb sixty or more years ago, his church was the one institu-
tion serving the whole community, and very broadly; there were lectures,
entertainments, organizations of various types, opportunities for all to par-
ticipate in a variety of worthwhile undertakings. In all this, my parents tried
to give unobtrusive wise leadership. The concept of one's profession as dedi-
cated to service, but the conviction also that there should be more adequate
beliefs and service, more understanding of people's needs and problems, be-
came basic elements in my own educational and vocational plans.

EDUCATIONAL WASTE, FRUSTRATION, FINDING

Helped by my mother I began reading before entering school. The

family subscribed to excellent magazines, my father's library was sizable and
included such compendia as the Encyclopedia Brittanica; I became an om-
nivorous reader. I also had a workbench; thus I early developed an interest
in handicraft and gadgets which has remained with me. With such a back-
ground, elementary school was, for me, often a sitting it out while the teacher
taught what I already knew or could more quickly get by myself. For many
of my classmates also, the eighth grade was mostly a repetitious waste of time.
In high school four years of Latin was not only drudgery but blocked
off other desired courses such as the sciences. Most broadly educative was a
summer job in a department store; I made special deliveries all over town in-
cluding the red-light district, wrapped bundles, and chummed with fellow
workers very different from people I had known before. The most valuable
course was in typing and shorthand, which resulted in a secretarial job the
next summer and has aided me ever since right up to and including the writ-
ing of this paper. Also valuable was a "literary society," giving experience in
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 315

debate. But mostly high school was dreary, and the last year seemed largely
surplus.
My first college year was at the University of Minnesota, where in a
physical education program I learned to swim, play handball, and tennis;
these continued to be my physical recreations so far as I had time for them,
till middle life when I turned to fishing and golf. The last three years (the
family having moved to Massachusetts) were at Williams, an old New Eng-
land college in a lovely setting, where student life was then dominated by
fraternities and athletic interests. Required were a fifth year of Latin, also
mathematics, composition, and English literature, largely repetitive of work
had before. Courses in philosophy gave none of the orientation to life I
sought. But a course in social psychology, using McDougall's book so titled
as chief reference, did give something regarding the dynamics of personality
for which I had been groping. It was taught by a student of Royce and
James, J. B. Pratt. Through him I obtained a Harvard scholarship, and there
I went with high hopes in 1912.
Certain difficulties began at once. Psychology was then in the Depart-
ment of Philosophy, and my first adviser, the philosopher R. B. Perry. He
protested my desire to take Walter B. Cannon's medical school course in
physiology as a foundation for psychology and Dean Holmes' basic course in
the new Graduate School of Education, where I sought ways schools might
be made less bumbling than I had found them. Perry said I needed instead
more epistemology and metaphysics. I insisted but so did he; the result was
a very busy year, not only because of the course load (and time taken in the
old streetcars across town to the medical school), but also because of the
diversity of associates and, indeed, basic points of view in graduate school,
medical school, and the school of education. But it was all very educa-
tive . . . ! As a result, in all my student advising, I have tried to give
greater freedom, and for forty years have been active in efforts to improve
graduate programs.
For further study I needed money, and if, as 1 now thought, I desired
to teach in college, I should try it. Here my father had not only a suggestion
-why not broaden my experience by teaching in a missionary college-but a
place found, a little home-missionary college in Alabama. So there I went,
never having known a Negro except for one college classmate, nor been in
the South. Not only did the race prejudices there shock me, but even more
the gross irrelevance of the educational program to student needs. For those
students attending at great sacrifice and presumably going back to live in
the South, there was a conventional arts program; in the little theological
seminary Hebrew was taught, but nothing about the problems to be faced in
a struggling Negro southern crossroads church. The students sensed these in-
adequacies; a protest meeting turned into a mild riot so blunderingly dealt
with by the president that the faculty chose a committee (of which I was a
leader) to ask the home office in New York to review the whole situation.
316 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

That review was made with such arrogant disregard of basic problems that
all the younger faculty left at the end of the year. I again had a Harvard
scholarship, and returned there almost exhausted.
The next year was a dreary struggle with ill health, language require-
ments, and a Titchnerian psychology barren of significance for me. When I
saw him about a thesis topic, Miinsterberg explained (with his famous ac-
cent) that each student should select his own, but went on to remark that
psychological effects of color much needed investigation; he had been told
that walls tinted a soft blue soothed hospital patients, that French women
working in the red light of photographic darkrooms seemed thereby made
more erotic, that clerks in offices with pastel green walls worked more effi-
ciently. Then he paused. My cue was evidently to choose this topic. I did so.
After much preliminary experimenting, the following setup and pro-
cedure were arrived at. The subject sat in a darkroom at a small table covered
with unglazed white paper over which was a light fixture giving either red,
green, or blue light of the same brightness, or bright medium or dim ordinary
light. In a given hour, each of the three hues or brightnesses was on for about
twelve minutes with about four minutes' intermission between. In each period
various records were obtained including pulse and respiration, judgments of
the pleasantness of substances touched, rate of free association, recall of non-
sense syllables, tapping at most comfortable speed, rate of multiplying one-
by two-place numbers, and rate of continuous choice reaction. The last three
tests seemed to show a somewhat faster rate with bright lights than dim; no
data evidenced any effect of hue (1921). Such dynamogenic effect of bright-
ness seemed plausible-and of possible interest to electric light companies!
But it seemed obvious that twelve minutes with a given brightness in a
laboratory darkroom at odd inconsequential tasks (and a total for three years
of only twenty-six subjects) told little about possible effects of similar bright-
ness continued throughout the day while working at tasks more substantial,
in shop or office or schoolroom. I became impatient of the artificialities and
limitations of the laboratory. And meantime I had begun work with the man
most influential on my career-R. M. Yerkes.
Here was a man dedicated to his work and of notable competence in it.
And he also was impatient of the philosophers; one afternoon he took me
into his office and pointed to a place over his desk where had hung a repro-
duction of a group portrait of James, Royce, and Palmer-in their place he
had pictures of three apes. "These," he said dryly, "are my new friends!" The
range of his research was exhilarating: from worms and frogs and mice not
only to the apes but also to humans, from idiots to "that most superior of all
persons, the physician!" He was then directing psychological work at the
Boston Psychopathic Hospital and chronically in friction with the staff there.
Venturing into this last work, I found it fascinating, and Yerkes appointed
me as a psychological intern there.
The hospital was a relatively new institution then, handling about 2,000
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 317

cases. a year, keeping each long enough for first diagnosis and reference to
state hospitals, social agencies, or other provision for treatment. To it the
police brought chronic alcoholics, criminals possibly psychotic, girls off the
streets; physicians, employers, social agencies referred individuals exhibiting
symptoms of mental illness or disability; into the outpatient department came
problem children from schools and juvenile courts and agencies for child
care, and immigrants the Port Authority had doubts about admitting. The
excellent staff was headed by E. E. Southard, outstanding among psychiatrists
of his time; there were also psychologists and social caseworkers. As intern I
made acquaintance with all these various groups, had access to the wards
and case records and excellent staff library, and attended morning staff
rounds and staff meetings. Here were abundant opportunities for study of
personality problems. The prevailing psychiatry saw causation as organic
rather than psychogenic, but with some interest in Freud, I saw cultural con-
Hicts and socioeconomic stresses as often major but neglected causative factors.
Research was encouraged. I had projects under Southard and also chief-
of-staff Herman Adler, but of course primarily with Yerkes. At his suggestion
I gave his Point Scale of General Ability (having essentially Binet-type ma-
terial but with like items together rather than scattered through age levels)
to dementia praecox and chronic alcoholic patients whose histories indicated
that they had attained adult intelligence. These results were compared in
detail with results from feebleminded and normal children of the same total
or mental age and a distinctive profile found, the psychotic doing especially
poorly on tests of immediate memory and learning but well on vocabulary.
The sum of the differences of the psychotics from the merely feebleminded
was used as a measure of irregularity; and by counting only those five tests
on which differences were greatest, a «differential unit" was formed which
distinguished with greater clarity the psychotic from the feebleminded. These
results could be put in terms of a differential table showing the percentage
probability that a given case was (for example) a feebleminded case with some
psychotic symptoms rather than a deteriorated alcoholic (1917). Also, adult
feebleminded gave a somewhat different profile from feebleminded children
of the same mental age. It is believed that these were the first differentiating
mental measurements of psychotics and, using irregularity to distinguish
deterioration from adult defect, also adult from child mental profiles.
So at long last in 1917 at the age of twenty-eight I obtained my Ph.D.,
having essentially completed two doctorate projects and other research be-
sides. In the process I had taken four graduate school years instead of the
then-usual three, and, in spite of my initial advisors, I got what I wanted but
spent about half my time on what I did not want and became physically
almost exhausted from overwork (plagued with insomnia, episodes of dizzi-
ness, and indigestion), Yerkes obtained for me an outstanding appointment
for the' next year as a special research assistant at Indiana University to in-
vestigate problems of mental deficiency and disease in that state. Postpone-
318 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ment of that appointment seemed likely when, shortly after the United
States entered the First World War, I was drafted, and then when Yerkes
offered me a commission for participation in the Army Psychological work;
but on both occasions I was rejected as physically in such condition as to be
unfit for any military service. So in September at Indiana I began what was
then a largely new type of service by a state university for the schools and
also state welfare institutions.
One of the social caseworkers at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital was a
Vassar graduate with some work in psychology there, who showed interest
in my research. Though a childhood victim of polio, corrective operations
and remedial exercises had carried her through to unusual physical vigor, but
with certain psychological residuals such as morbid fear of operations, cancer
(from which her mother had died), childbirth, storms, and closed places-on
a European trip she had slept on a deck chair, finding a cabin intolerable.
We talked over our problems, became very well acquainted, and planned
marriage. This was delayed until after my rejection for military service, but
early in 1918 she joined me in Indiana and, desiring a career, began graduate
work and obtained the doctorate with my guidance, using part of the total
project for her research.

TOWARD A PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL
TECHNOLOGY

The initial task at Indiana University was to determine the number of

subnormal children in the schools of the county, but a secondary interest
was also to locate those of superior ability. It soon became evident that, even
for a very first rough sorting out, the teachers could not be depended upon;
one was found who had herself never progressed beyond the fourth grade!
So a multi test group examination for grades three through twelve was de-
vised, and all the schools in the county were visited by me and my wife
travelling in a buggy, or by a graduate student. In the little one-room schools
the group test was first given and quickly scored, then the Stanford-Binet
given to doubtful cases. By such relating to the Binet, also by giving the
group examination (a) to all who could take it in the state school for the
feebleminded and comparing results with Binet and case records there, and
(b) to classes for the gifted in the Louisville schools, evidence was obtained
validating that the examination did indeed differentiate the very dull and
very bright.
Clearly the schools of this largely rural southern Indiana county were
burdened with many subnormal children; also bright children were being
held to a slow-average lockstep pace, though a few who had accelerated illus-
trated how successful such expediting might be. All this was reported in local
and state conferences. Further surveys evidenced that schools in the same
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 319

small city might differ markedly in their "pupil material," also different rural
areas, in congruence with the socioeconomic status of the areas served; and
different promotion policies showed unexpected, significant results (1919).
We had many requests for more such work.
I therefore began construction of very inexpensive and easy-to-give-take-
and-score tests markedly different from the elaborate batteries then appearing
and prevalent since-hoping to make tests a convenient, welcomed aid rather
than a resented burden in the schools. For grades three through twelve the
first "crosscut" test, on the front page of a little six-by-nine-inch four-page
folder, consisted of twenty-five items such as "see a I man on," the task being
to draw a line through the word not belonging in the sentence. The second
test consisted of twenty-five lines such as "dog cow horse oak cat," in which
the item that did not belong with the others was to be crossed off. A number
series and an abstract meanings test were similarly simple and of some in-
trinsic interest. The blanks cost only $1.25 per hundred, a class could be
tested in twenty-five minutes, blanks scored one per minute. Another inex-
pensive easy-to-use folder made up what is believed to have been the first
group objective examination for grades one through three. The first test con-
sisted of twenty-five patterns of dots with one extra to be marked off; the
second test had groups of pictures, for example two dogs and a cat, and the
incongruent object was to be checked; a paper form board and picture-
absurdities test followed, having surplus or wrong elements to be crossed out
(with L. C. Pressey, 1919). Very practical validating research showed that
this little four-test folder, given in the first month of the first grade, sectioned
pupils better than a teacher could then do, in terms of the sectioning she had
arrived at by the end of the year. The two cross-out folders thus roughly
surveyed general ability for grades one through twelve. Similarly simple little
folders sampled attainment in the basic school subjects, and a double-entry
table then facilitated location of "under-achievers."
Most original was a personality inventory which in its most-used form
had on three six-by-nine-inch pages a total of 450 items all covered by the
average student in about twenty-five minutes-a record as regards compact-
ness and yield of score in a given time which apparently still stands after
forty years. On the first page, the directions were to cross out everything
considered wrong in twenty-five lines listing a variety of borderland social
and moral taboos such as "begging smoking Hirting spitting giggling," then
go back and circle the one item in each line thought worst-in effect, each
word was a question and each line one more. The second and third pages
similarly sampled worries and interests. The total number of words crossed
was considered the total affect, and the number of lines in which the circled
word was other than the one which had been found modal was total idiosyn-
crasy. These were called "X-O" tests because of the crossing and circling.
HDifferential units" for various purposes were to be empirically determined;
thus certain words were found distinctively more or less often marked by
 320 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

good as compared with poor students; these were scored as a subscale and
found in combination with a test of general ability to give better prognosis
of academic success than that test alone (1927, pp. 71-80).
In 1923 I used the inventory in a survey from the middle grades through
college, finding a progressive liberalization of attitudes especially through the
college years; and I repeated the survey in 1933, 1943, and 1953, finding a
continuing liberalization over the thirty-year period. Analysis showed espe-
cially a consistent and striking change in sex-social attitudes-less marking
of immodesty as wrong, more frank checking of kissing and flirting as liked,
and more worry about marriage. Data from adults in 1953 showed progres-
sive increase with age in items marked wrong, which cross-comparison indi-
cated was not due to increasing conservatism with age, but rather to a per-
sistence of attitudes established in the young adulthood of the earlier time
(with A. W. Jones, 1955). These in total appear to be the most systematic
measures yet of cultural change over a substantial period of time and in rela-
tion to developmental change.
The four years at Indiana University resulted in fifty-three papers by
myself, my wife, local teachers, and the departmental secretary-I at once
began bringing others into the program and giving them such recognition. I
had some clerical and secretarial help, usually taught one class sometimes in
extension, presented papers at local, state, and national meetings, and worked
in schools and state institutions. It was an almost ideal way to begin a pro-
fessional career and resulted in an invitation to Ohio State University as
assistant professor in 1921, where I insisted on an appointment for my
wife also.
There the feverish pace continued. In the next dozen years were pro-
duced three books, two laboratory manuals and a monograph, some seventy-
five professional papers, and four teaching machines. I also had a full teaching
load, increasing numbers of graduate students, and committee assignments.
I also attended regional and national meetings in both psychology and edu-
cation, usually participating in some way. It was a marvelously stimulating,
challenging life. In 1926 I was given the rank of full professor.
The first book (with L. C. Pressey, 1922) brought together in very prac-
tical fashion then-current work in testing of both ability and attainment in
the school subjects. The book was widely used and reissued in England and
in a French translation. The second text (with L. C. Pressey, 1926), based
on my experience at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and in the Indiana
surveys, attempted an overview of the full range of mental abnormalities and
deficiencies with avoidance of both psychiatric and psychoanalytic technical-
ities. It featured a reassuring consideration of the average person as typically
having some mental quirks and so not to be unduly alarmed thereby. It em-
phasized cultural and socioeconomic stresses as causative of, or at least in-
volved in, psychopathologies, and the importance of a more widespread
understanding of problems of mental health.
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 321

Most original was a volume (with others, 1927) reporting eighteen in-
vestigations regarding problems of higher education-with which two-thirds
of all doctoral projects under my direction have been concerned, on the
double ground of need therefor and appropriateness for students looking
toward college positions. The first chapter differentiated most effective meth-
ods of study by contrasting those used by superior and failing students; a
laboratory course based on the findings was shown to be a great help to pr~
bationers, case reports made vivid their problems. Some students in a required
course in educational psychology were able to pass the final examination at
the beginning of the course; some topics were so generally known as to need
no teaching, the understanding of a few students was actually confused
thereby, and some very important topics were left out-pretests and both cur-
ricular and instructional research seemed clearly needed. A simple test of
sensitivity to blank verse showed many freshmen to have none, even after all
that high school Shakespeare. Why, then, should it be taught in high school?
Unsuspected gross deficiencies in preparation (for example, inability to handle
common or decimal fractions) were found to hamper some students but were
readily remediable. Incisive experiments regarding teaching methods led to
substantial improvements, evidenced for example by more students electing
further courses in the subject. Inclusion in doctorate programs of considera-
tion of the problems of higher education was urged. I introduced such a
course and gave it for many years.
Such research was continued. Thus I persuaded a courageous graduate
student to take four oral examinations under four different faculty commit-
tees with concealed stenographers taking down all questions asked. Most of
the questions in one examination were irrelevant; two committees failed the
candidate and two passed her (with L. C. Pressey and Elinor J. Barnes, 1932).
As a result the department made certain changes in its examining procedure.
But I was most interested in what might be called psycho-educational tech-
nology in the public schools. Thus having noted a remark by Leonard Ayres
that certain features of handwriting might hamper legibility though not
affect appearance, I collected samples of handwriting from elementary school
through college and from adults, had these read by a laboratory class, illegi-
bilities being checked. Relatively few malformings ("a" written to look like
"u" or lid" like "cl", or Ug" like "y", Hr" or "e" like undotted "i") accounted
for the most difficulties in reading. A simple chart facilitated identifying and
tabulating such errors. Remedial work concentrating on each pupil's specific
difficulties was very effective: thus a fourth grade class so aided showed not
only gains over a control class in speed of writing and quality, but also a
fifty percent increase in the rate at which its writing could be read.
Problems in English composition were analogously investigated. Thus
uses of capital letters in magazines, newspapers, and business letters were
tabulated, also, capitalization errors in samples of writing from elementary
school through college and from adults, and both usage and errors data
 322 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

brought together in one table in terms of frequencies per 10,000 words. The
few needed usages not mastered were then evident (1924). Individual con-
ferences with pupils about their capitalization errors gave insight as to causes
(with Pera Campbell, 1933). Rules for capitalization were then formulated,
taking account of actual usage, errors, and pupils' misunderstandings, and a
little six by nine inch test sheet was made up, systematically covering these
rules. Essentials in punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure were simi-
larly determined (most conventional material on these last two topics being
found irrelevant to practical needs) and simple diagnostic tests covering them
prepared, also a little pamphlet, Guide to Correctness in Written Work, giv-
ing rules which if followed would eliminate nine-tenths of all errors in com-
position. These materials were very widely used.
Special attention was given to th..t most important tool subject-reading.
A 1000-word sampling method of measuring the vocabulary burden of books
(with Bertha Lively, 1923) showed even some primers having sizeable loads;
a junior high school science text had a technical vocabulary of over 2000
terms. But a series of master's degree studies taking account of frequency of
use, judgments as to importance by experienced teachers, and adult needs,
usually showed essential terms to be perhaps a quarter of those used-most
texts were barnacled with excess terminology. The goal was to prepare for
each public school subject a classified list of important technical terms and
simple tests systematically covering them, which would serve as both apprais-
ing and instructional devices. All this was part of the great general interest
around 1925 in the "psychology of the school subjects." But the "teaching
machine" I exhibited at the AP A meeting that year proved ahead of the
times.
In a window of the little apparatus showed a four-choice question to
which the student responded by pressing the key corresponding to the answer
he thought right. If it was, the next question turned up, but if not, he had
to try again until he did hnd the right answer-meanwhile a counter kept a
cumulative record of his tries. Moreover (two features no device since has
had) if a lever were raised, the device was changed into a self-scoring and
rewarding testing machine: whatever key was pressed, the next question
turned up, but the counter counted only rights; also when the set on a reward
dial was reached, a candy lozenge was automatically presented ( 1926). A
paper the next year reported a device which, on successive times through an
objective lesson sheet, presented again only those questions on which a mis-
take had been made before the right answer was found the previous time
through, that is, there was selective review. And a third device automatically
marked each error on a student's test-answer strip, printed on it the total of
his errors, and kept a cumulative count of number of errors on each question
so that the instructor could at once see which questions had been most missed
and center his discussion about them (1932). Carefully controlled experi-
ments evidenced that class use of this last little machine as an instructional
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 323

aid significantly increased learning as measured by midterm and final exami-

nations, and the first type of device even more. My former student Hans
Peterson and his brother devised and similarly attested the value of a very
simple paper feedback "teaching machine"; if a wrong answer on a test answer
slip was moistened, it at once turned red, but the right answer green. If such
feedback devices were used with materials derived from curricular and in-
structional research such as described above, an "industrial revolution" in
education seemed possible (Lumsdaine-Glaser Sourcebook, pp. 32-93, 497-
505).
However, by this time the Great Depression was making it ironic to
facilitate the progress of young people into careers when there were no
careers to be found or to save labor in teaching when there were many more
teachers than jobs. The manufacturer of the one crude teaching machine I
had been able to get on the market withdrew it from sale. The publisher of
my tests went out of business. And-my wife asked for a divorce, having plans
for a second marriage. The fault may chiefly have been mine: we were too
much together, I too often insisted on correcting what I considered hasty in
her work while she thought me overly careful, my compulsive absorption in
my work was undoubtedly at times hard to live with. So not only my marriage,
but a professional partnership, broke up. After thirty-four years the hurt is
still with me. But in the crisis, friendships were found stronger than I had
realized. Two colleagues, who had been more aware than I of my wife's dis-
affection, willingly served as witnesses for me to obtain the divorce on
grounds of desertion; the departmental chairman and dean and university vice
president, all of whom knew us well, assured me that my university status
would not be affected. And when I talked with my wife's best friend (also a
woman on the university faculty) about the situation, her sensible kindly
understanding was in healing contrast to the tense irritability to which I had
been accustomed. The association ripened into a marriage which over the
past thirty years has been vital for my well-being and the most precious expe-
rience of my life. Thus at the age of forty-five, both my personal and my
professional life were largely reconstituted. So far as possible I dropped work,
especially at the public school level with which my first wife had been asso-
ciated and which she wished somewhat to continue, to build something of a
second career. And for that, a major undertaking was ready at hand.

TEACHER-TRAINING, LIFESPAN VIEW,

ACCELERATION

Around 1930 the College of Education began an attempt to remake its

entire program; I was a member of the central committee and some dozen
subsidiary groups. I agreed to criticisms that then-current textbooks in educa-
tional psychology were loaded with charts showing the anatomy of the spinal
 324 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

chord, progress of rats in a maze, and nonsense-syllable learning in the labora-

tory, but had too little about children in school and their work there. And I
agreed that the complex meaningful learning going on there was little ex-
plained by theory derived largely from research with animals. I countered
that the required courses in education were also not close to educational
realities, notorious on campus as poorly taught and inconsistent-200 students
given an uninterrupted lecture on the importance of small classes with full
pupil participation and free discussion! And I accepted the challenge to build
a course in educational psychology wl.ich would in content and method be
accepted as basic to a sound program of teacher education. In this effort I
brought out a text ( 1933) radically different from those in the field at that
time, with a congruent sourcebook and laboratory manual. I developed in-
structional methods yet more venturesome and a supportive graduate program.
The first half of the text, "Development During the School Years," in-
cluded chapters on physical growth and health, stressing interrelationships
with personality; on interests manifested in play and reading, radio, and
movie likes; on the social psychology of these years, stressing the often con-
flicting social worlds of home, school, peers, and adults; on emotional stress,
seeing causes therefor especially in these conflicts; on the individual child
with brief case studies illustrating the need for a teacher to understand each
pupil as a person. l\1aterial came from pediatrics, psychiatry, and sociology
as well as education and psychology. The volume's second half, "Learning in
School," featured curves of progress in arithmetic, reading, and composition
with evidence that curricular and instructional research could make learning
more effective. Curves for forgetting showed how little might be retained
months or years after of what had been learned in a school or college class.
Transfer data showed how little Latin benefited English, or Algebra "trained
the mind," but stressed "applicational transfer"-how a school safety cam-
paign might be made to reduce accidents. Omitted was all the research with
animals and in the artificialities of the laboratory and also theory based
essentially thereon, in favor of cognitive concepts of meaningful learning.
Again sources were various, including Science Education, English Journal,
]ournal of Home Economics, as well as the more commonly cited psychologi-
cal periodicals. The book was very widely used, issued in a Swedish edition,
and translated into Japanese and Turkish-but comparatively little noted by
psychologists, perhaps because too apostate in theory and sources.
Also distinctive was the Casebook of Research in Educational Psy-
chology (with J. E. Janney, 1937): seventy-six very readable and interest-
ing reports showing that, for instance, training therein can increase leader-
ship in children, that first-grade tots using self-instructional matter can
teach themselves to read, that history may best be taught backward, that a
motion picture may have long-lasting effects on adolescent attitudes, that
educational effectiveness can literally he weighted-that youngsters in a
course in vocational agriculture increased the yield of pork per sow on their
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 325
farms by over 200 pounds! A Laboratory Workbook in Applied Educational
Psychology (with N. E. Troyer, 1936) began with a data sheet to be filled
out and turned in by each student regarding his background and interests,
thus acquainting his instructor with him and illustrating knowledge a
teacher should have about her pupils. Simple exercises in tabulating, finding
percentiles, making and interpreting graphs were based on data as to needs
therefor to read texts in educational psychology and use tests. Since most
public school teachers had been found unfamiliar with professional journals,
another task called for selection and appraisal of three (from samples in the
laboratory) most relevant to teaching plans. Yet another project involved
selection, from samples available in the classroom, and evaluation of three
standard tests each student might wish to use in his teaching. All the
twenty-five projects were similarly practical-for example, a diagnosis of
illegibilities in each other's handwriting, as described earlier.
The course, taken usually in the freshman year, met in five fifty-minute
sessions for a quarter in sections of about thirty students each (five to eight
sections each quarter), the instructors being doctoral candidates mostly in
educational psychology and having as their research projects some issue of
college teaching, often with this course serving as laboratory. I usually
taught one section each quarter. It was understood that any instructor could
visit any other class (including mine) any time. There were weekly staff
meetings. I declared that under all these circumstances teaching by graduate
students was better than by the average faculty member and invited my
colleagues in education to come see. All sections met in a large room re-
served exclusively for this course and having round tables seating five-cast-
offs from a dormitory dining room and repaired as a class project by students
in the course majoring in industrial arts, who also made cabinets holding
sample tests and other materials used and exhibit cases displaying instruc-
tional material and other relevant matter, much of it brought in by the
students and explained in class by them. On the wall were relevant pictures
and charts and above them a frieze depicting children at play or in school,
drawn on wrapping paper with crayons by fine arts students in the course.
Perhaps half the class hours went into very informal class discussion-
never formal lectures. More often the students worked at the tables, going
to the cases for laboratory materials and supplementary reading as needed,
talking freely with each other and the instructor. Some laboratory work might
be service to a school; thus when the school superintendent in a small city
asked help in a survey, a young instructor and his wife and a student from
each section spent three days there giving tests and forms, which were
graded in the laboratory and first reports drawn up there (with others, 1940).
Beginning with the information on the student data sheet, each instruc-
tor was expected to get acquainted with his students and foster their get-
ting acquainted with each other. At each table, such acquaintance pro-
ceeded rapidly and might be broadened by moving some students from one
 326 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

table to another. Sociometric appraisals evidenced that students became

much more widely and closer acquainted than in the average class (with
David C. Hanna. 1943). Indeed, alumni have told me of several marriages
which so began. Since the quarter of educational psychology normally fol-
lowed the required quarter course in general psychology, it was often pos-
sible to continue the same instructor with largely the same group through
two quarters, thus increasing acquaintance yet more. An instructor might
occasionally have lunch with groups of students or arrange class parties or
picnics, all the time watching each youngster in a variety of situations and
using them for the benefit of each. I have long felt that counselors and
therapists grossly limited their understanding of cases and yet more their
helpfulness by depending almost entirely on that highly special and often
artificial methodology, the interview, when such informal classes as de-
scribed above give opportunities for interviews when needed but permit
observation of each student in various situations and use of them therapeu-
tically. Both case studies and a variety of other evidence made clear such
values.
As a result of the curriculum revision mentioned a few paragraphs
above, all other departments in the College of Education were done away
with and all other required courses merged in a series labelled Education
number so and so. But the course in educational psychology had gotten itself
a new and distinctive text, sourcebook, laboratory manual, and the most
colorful, unique, and lively classroom in the college, often shown to visiting
educators. It was handling some 800 students a year in classes of around
thirty by methods advocated (but not practiced) by the "progressive edu-
cators" on the faculty, with tight supervision obtaining excellent instruction
from graduate students while both training them in such teaching and
fostering relevant research. Appraisals by seniors and recent graduates rated
the course outstanding. The college agreed that educational psychology
should remain independent, and the required course continue under my
direction-as it did for some twenty-five years. But outcomes were not only
local. The wide use of the text and other materials, the reports I gave at
meetings and published in journals (for instance, 1940, 1942), and the in-
fluence of former instructors in the course, many of whom soon moved into
positions of some importance, all presumably helped keep psychology ex-
plicitly in teacher-training and put educational psychology explicitly in the
AAAP and then in the reorganized APA-as will be mentioned shortly.
Meanwhile from 1934 through 1939, I was working on what I appraise
as my best book, Life: A Psychological Survey (with J. E. Janney and R. C.
Kuhlen, 1939). Having experienced certain stresses in midlife, I wanted to
study what life then looked like. The volume considered the full sweep of
human development and change throughout the life span, with emphasis
(surely appropriate in this time of depression and international turmoil) on
socioeconomic and cultural factors affecting that development. In both re-
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 327

spects the book was a radical departure from those then current. Most seemed
to assume that development stopped at eighteen; one venturesome author
gave fifteen pages to all the years from puberty till death, but forty-five pages
to development from conception till birth; I left out the last topic completely
and gave most space to the years after twenty. Another text gave thirty per-
cent of its space to such topics as inheritance of wing color in the fruit By,
microscopic structure of various tissues, and behavior of chicks reared in
darkness, but to socioeconomic and cultural phenomena only three pages;
again I left out all the first type of material and gave a third of the book
to the last (1940, also 1949).
For the wide-ranging library work involved, I assembled a little staff of
students, paying them myself-during the Depression no funds therefor
were available and many students were in great need. The two who were
with the undertaking the full five years I made co-authors. And I used
"quarters off" for relevant "field work": visits to settlement houses and hous-
ing developments and courts in New York and Washington, to congressional
hearings and government bureaus, to CCC camps and WP A projects, to
Mexico for a glimpse of a more primitive economy and culture. A summer's
teaching at the University of Hawaii in 1937 was followed by four months
work there using especially my friend Gregg Sinclair's Institute of Oriental
Studies, and contacts with the many racial groups in the Hawaiian islands.
Part one of the volume dealt with «Conditions and Circumstances of
Life," noting the population explosion (not much noted then) and the
lengthening life span, with data on marriage and divorce and the family, on
employment, and differences in different parts of the world in these respects.
Again with many simple tables and graphs the next chapter considered living
conditions in different world areas and from earlier times to now, also
wealth, income, and education. A chapter on "the invisible environment-
culture" dramatically illustrated changes as in the status of women, codes of
conduct and humanitarianism, and in science and technology (and what
changes since this 1939 book!). Then central issues were turned to: first
physical growth-not only through adolescence but especially after and into
age-in physique, strength, skill, and morbidity. The book considered many
problems: Not only how does "intelligence" grow through the growth
years but does it cease growing or even decline soon thereafter; when is
there most creativity; and when warrant for retirement? What is and what
should be the course of the work life? How do interests change not only
from five to fifteen but to thirty, sixty, eighty? What changes occur in social
life through all these years; in attitudes, character traits, personality? How
do brief life stories of morons, criminals, psychotics, average citizens, and
famous men and women illustrate these issues? And finally in the light of
all this, how might a reader best try to increase his efficiency, better his
adjustments, and .plan his life?
The book was well received as a pioneering venture, tried in a few col-
328 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

leges as a beginning text, and found increasing use in courses in develop-

mental psychology extended to cover the life span and in adult education for
courses on "the psychology of adult life." I increasingly turned my efforts in
these directions, had large evening classes in a course on "Psychology in
Biography" (as I later found Elliott was doing), initiated the APA Division
on "Adulthood and Age" (1948), and in 1957 published, with Kuhlen,
Psychological Development Through the Life Span. All this in total has,
I believe. contributed appreciably to increased recognition of the need that
psychological phenomena be considered in the perspective of the total span
of life-and with a broad scholarship reaching discriminatingly into the
social as well as the biological sciences.
The outbreak of the Second World War brought great interest in ways
to expedite various types of training and in educational acceleration. I sug-
gested to Dean Klein of the College of Education that this last topic greatly
needed intensive investigation (for which in sundry respects I was well pre-
pared). He arranged (with the support in this as in many other matters of
my good friend Harold Burtt, chairman of the Department of Psychology)
that for several years my time was largely freed for such research, with a
small staff and excellent campus-wide cooperation. The total project was
reported in some twenty-four papers and a monograph (1949), with further
papers since.
An historical survey emphasized the incoordinations in the total Ameri-
can educational system and possibilities of time-saving in both school and
college. There, the freshman year often largely repeated secondary school
work. Many, including President Eliot of Harvard, had advocated three
instead of four college undergraduate years, and Clark College had for
twenty years so operated (as did the English universities). Ph.D. programs,
imported from Germany where they followed the Gymnasium, were here
put on top of the American four-year college; we compiled data showing
that, as a result, Americans obtained the doctorate about four years older
than German students. The long summer vacation seemed a relic of an
agricultural economy.
Many excellent investigations had also agreed that students entering
college young did best, and those graduating young had the best records.
We piled up the most extensive data so far emphasizing these findings and
showing that young students were not maladjusted but rather participated
more in student activities. We also showed that students who during the
war years completed a four-year undergraduate program in three calendar
years or less (a few in two years) did better academically than cases paired
with them in ability and age at entrance, and were about as active in student
affairs. Most common means of acceleration was by attending school four
quarters, and we gathered evidence indicating no harmful effects therefrom
or from the heavier-than-average course loads sometimes taken; and students
taking credit by examination thereafter did well in courses thus advanced
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 329

to. It seemed clear that many students could progress more rapidly than
the usual lockstep pace (begin school at six, then take twelve years in school
and four in college); and there were intimations that functioning ability
might be increased thereby (Pressey, 1962). Indeed, studies of precocious
geniuses suggest that they may be in no small part the product of oppor-
tunity to progress rapidly (1955).
But might the accelerated student begin a career too young? We found
that young women graduating from our College of Education at the age
of twenty had a somewhat better professional record thereafter than cases
paired with them as to ability but graduating at twenty-two. A ten-year fol-
lowup of the above-mentioned students who during the war finished a four-
year program in three years or less showed they were doing better than the
controls who took four (Pressey and Flesher, 1955). Men graduating from
an eastern college young more often had superior careers. And continuing
investigation brought evidence that those obtaining the doctorate young tend
more often to become outstanding. Thus, recently, median age of attaining
the Ph.D. degree in psychology has been thirty-one, but for AP A presidents
it was twenty-five (1962; 1965). All this is congruent with Lehman's evi-
dence of greatest creativity in the young adult years and more generally, of
greatest vitality and liveliness of interests during those years (with R. C.
Kuhlen, 1957).
Now over a quarter of the population of this country is in school, five
million in higher education and this number likely to double soon, with
increasing numbers of these continuing into some form of professional train-
ing. As things are now, half of such a man's life may pass before he can
begin his life-work. As Dael WoHle has recently declared in a striking edi-
torial in Science, "It almost seems as if a conspiracy existed to delay the age
at which the formal educational system lets go of a young scientist and
allows him to be on his own" (1964, p. 104). And he goes on to specify how
from the first grade (half as many children enter at five now as twenty
years ago) to the doctorate (now taken a year later than formerly) there is
delay-and now more often a post-doctorate to delay further. For many
years (really since the beginning of my career) I have been fighting that
conspiracy. There is abundant evidence that more bright children should
begin school at five, go on to obtain the undergraduate degree by twenty,
and complete professional training by twenty-five. Years would thus be
added to a career in the most creative time of life-also more students would
thus be able to complete such training and university facilities freed therefor.

APA, AUTOMATION, AGEING

Like most applied psychologists, I was sympathetic with and did all I
could to foster the organization of the American Association of Applied
330 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Psychology before the Second World War. And I urged friends to join and
set up a section in educational psychology; many were moving toward the
American Educational Research Association. Of that section I was chairman
during the war. However, psychology then again became greatly interested
in applications, and I was sympathetic with Yerkes' efforts to bring the two
associations back together but with such reorganization as would meet the
needs which had caused the Iission. In 1944-45 I was a member of both
the governing board of the AAAP and the council of the AP A and appointed
to a joint committee to consider proposals for again having one association
but composed of divisions giving recognition to the many various types of
work then evident in the total field of psychology. After many meetings,
essentially the present organization of the AP A was arrived at. I then did
my best, as the one person on both Board and Council, to obtain approval
by these groups and then a vote-through at the business meetings of both
associations. After some uncertainties, all this was done. For several years
thereafter, efforts (which I opposed) were made to reduce drastically the
number of divisions, but all failed. And, as already mentioned, I initiated
the Iirst division (on maturity and age) thereafter added-thus also trying
out the procedure for such addition. Perhaps it will now be generally agreed
that, with the great growth in numbers of psychologists and diversi£cation
of their interests, some such structure was necessary to give these various in-
terests an opportunity to develop and for those concerned to associate.
Early in the War I wrote the Navy Office of Research and Invention,
telling of my teaching machines. A reply asked what they cost. I answered
that they were not in manufacture but that I had working models which I
would be glad to bring to Washington and demonstrate at my own expense.
To this there was no reply. However, after the war Victor Raimy from
Ohio State became a member of the staff of that office and suggested that I
make application for a grant. This was obtained and renewed, supporting
some eight doctoral projects and making possible the most systematic re-
search in the £eld thus far-largely in the numerous sections in educational
psychology. The device used most was a little three by £ve punch hoard :
a face-plate of thin press-board had thirty rows each of four one-eighth inch
holes in two columns; under it could be inserted a slip of paper and under
that a keyplate with holes only for the right answers, face-plate and guide
strips for the inserts were riveted to a pressboard base. The "teach-test"
questions were on a mimeographed sheet. The student answered each
question by pushing his pencil-point into the hole in the face-plate of the
punchboard corresponding to the answer he thought right. 1£ it was, his
pencil pushed through the paper on into the keyplate hole. But if he was
wrong, the pencil-point barely broke through the slip of paper, and he had
to try again until he did £nd the right answer, until the pencil-point did go
deep (1950).
U sing chiefly this very simple device, a variety of issues were investigated
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 331

with a great variety of materials from nonsense syllables to college textbooks

and in various ways. Such feedback with objective items was found to aid
meaningful learning much more than rote learning and to show on write-in
as well as objective end-tests. Analysis showed the feedback to aid in two
ways: initial right answers about which the learner was somewhat uncer-
tain were confirmed as right and so more likely to be made again, and (by
far the most important effect) initial wrong answers were at once identified
as such in immediate juxtaposition to the right answer, and wrongs were
thereafter avoided. Items varied greatly in their instructional efficacy; dif-
ficult, challenging questions exposing common misconceptions were the best.
With meaningful matter, the elucidative learning carne mostly the first
time through a teach-test, but repeating it added a little. If in a college
course a teach-test was given only occasionally and incidentally, and a check
test a day or so later repeated or paraphrased some questions and added some
new ones on the same topic, gains over a control group were found to be
relatively specific and did not extend to the new items. But an instructional
aid should rather be used systematically as part of a total teaching plan.
To appraise one way of doing so, experienced instructors in some sec-
tions of the course in educational psychology began the hour when a reading
assignment was due, by giving a teach-test thereon with a punchboard. As
each student finished (usually in about fifteen minutes), he was free to
look up any point in the reading (usually available in the classroom) or
discuss it with another student or the instructor-for whom all this fur-
nished points of departure for his further discussion of the assignment, to
which two class hours were usually allotted. Toward the end of the second
hour another punchboard test was given, with time for brief discussion
afterwards. Though the teach-tests did not count on grades, they were an
additional reason for preparing. Of the total sixty feedback questions, some
were factual, others applicational, or judgemental; headings might group
them with page references after each, indicating where consideration of it
could be found. Half of the assignments were so handled, the others taught
in the usual fashion of informal discussion. And half of the first and second
half-quarter objective examinations were on these last assignments; of those
questions on auto-instructed readings, a third were repeated from the teach-
tests, a third paraphrased therefrom, and a third new.
Meanwhile, other sections went through the teach-test blanks but
without the punch board; answers were marked on an answer slip, then dis-
cussed with other students or the instructor, who thereupon collected the
slips, later graded them, and returned them for possible further discussion.
And meanwhile, control sections went through the entire course in the
conventional fashion of informal class-meeting. Instructors were rotated and
the special procedures soon became routine; the total research design seemed
sound. On midterm and final examinations the punchboard-aided sections
(even though so aided on less than half the assignments) scored strikingly
332 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

higher than the controls and above those going through all the teach-tests
but without that immediate feedback. Item-analysis showed the punchboard
sections doing best not only on questions repeated or paraphrased from the
teach-tests but also on new questions on both the assignments auto-instructed
and those not. In short, when teach-tests with feedback were made part of
the total instructional procedure, the gain was not simply on items thus
dealt with but was spread so as somewhat to raise performance in the entire
course-as had been found in the earlier research already mentioned and
similar in design.
The above work all involved classes meeting the usual class periods
and time so used in those periods. Other experiments, believed potentially
more important, showed that students could with the help of teach-tests
cover a five-hour course in one two-hour evening meeting a week, in an in-
dependent study laboratory finish the course in the first half of the quar-
ter, and in even less time so prepare to pass the course by examination.
A wide range of usefulness for objective instructional tests with feedback,
such as aid in study of books or other material, seemed attested; and various
possible values to the Navy were indicated. Thus, the use of new equipment
sent to a distant port might be expedited if explanations included feedback
teach-tests. A three-by-five-inch "cherno-card" was put in limited manu-
facture which seemed almost the ultimate in inexpensive convenience; on
its face were the thirty rows each of four one-eighth-inch squares which the
student checked with an inexpensive fountain pen filled with a special red
ink; when he checked the right square, his mark instantly changed to black.
He thus was guided to the right choice for each question; the marks remain-
ing red were his errors (easily counted to give his error score); and the card
could be kept as a detailed record. I had high hope of general use not only
in the Services but also the schools.
However, personnel in the Navy office had changed again, and the
cards were rejected offhand on the ground that the trainees would always
be stealing the pens; a clumsy form of punchboard was made up and tried
in ways regarding which I was not consulted, then dropped. Again my whole
effort had apparently failed. But Leslie Briggs, who had taken his doctorate
with me and in one phase of the project, continued an interest; Lumsdaine
became interested; and Skinner wrote me and we had several delightful
conferences. Being now near retirement I planned no more such work.
Then I was startled, at an Air Force conference on the subject in De-
cember of 1958, by the learning theorists' ignorance of the great amount and
variety of research regarding learning in school and assurance in applying
there concepts derived primarily from rat maze-running or paired-associate
memorizing. And I was shocked at what followed: the most extraordinary
commercialization of a new idea in American educational history-hundreds
of teaching machines were put on the market, some sold door-to-door with
extravagant claims, others costing thousands of dollars, hundreds of "pro-
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 333
grams" published with as many as 16,000 frames, all involving many millions
of dollars investment. Then millions of research dollars went into, first, the
confident elaboration of these ideas and only slowly into any questioning of
them. The last chapter of the conference report (Galanter, 1959) gives my
critique thereof. Reluctantly, I further attacked both programming methods
and basic theory (1963, 1964), as exemplified in most of this work.
My recent critical articles focused on the Holland-Skinner programmed
college text The Analysis of Behavior (1961) as the authoritative pioneer
of its type, involving, as had my research, an undergraduate course in psy-
chology-and also involving processes of reading and study which I had
much investigated. Such investigations had stressed the importance of read-
ing for larger meanings and of noting paragraphs, headings, and summaries
to lind and structure those meanings, also to guide preview and review of
main points. But the programming eliminated such cues to structure and
aids to overviewing; instead there was interminable bit-learning of specific
responses to interminable "frames," with interminable writing in of "con-
structed" completions for each and interminable page turning. I illustrated
how simple little class experiments could prove that (a) such time-taking
busy-work brought no more learning than simply silent reading; (h) ob-
jective questions with feedback did not, with meaningful matter, mislead
the learner with their wrong alternatives (as Skinner had assumed on a
priori grounds) but did clarify meanings; and (c) such questions used to
check on and clarify the understanding of organized subject matter could
get better understanding than Skinner-type programs at a fraction of the
cost in time and paper.
I also made more explicit than before research procedures for the best
development of such questions in aid of study-reading: the reading should
first be assigned and very broad essay-type questions asked to find what aid
is needed; where there is need, questions should be formulated using mis-
takes most often occurring (usually only one or two and thus warranting
no more than three-choice questions) as wrong alternatives and the most
colloquially clear as the right one. The first trial should eliminate not
only all questions but also all alternatives not evidenced as aiding learning
(with J. R. Kinzer, 1964). Methodology thus seemed clarified, and the value
of objective questions with feedback as aid in use of, but not replacement
of books and like matter, was repeatedly evidenced for over thirty years.
However, at seventy-six I could hardly continue such research. Program-
ming has become a magic word, and the "write-in" response generally ac-
cepted. Though my criticisms thereof might be listened to, my concept of
feedback material as elucidating rather than replacing organized matter was
apparently not understood. To no other undertaking have I devoted so much
time and effort. I remain of the conviction that a distinctive cognitive theory
rather than an animal-derived stimulus-response theory is still to be found
to explain meaningful human learning adequately, and that simple objec-
334 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tive feedback devices could so greatly facilitate such learning as largely to

remake our educational procedures.
At the Boston Psychopathic Hospital I had seen many senile cases
often complicated by alcoholism or physical illness and usually of poor socio-
economic status. But as I came to know well certain older faculty members,
I realized that deterioration might not be a major feature of age. Then in
1944 my eighty-eight-year-old father came to live with us. He was still ac-
tive and alert, read avidly, and had wide interests; there even seemed to be
certain gains with age-a relaxed mellowing of mood, more humor and
good humor, more tolerant judgement. Though slowing down physically,
in intellect and personality he remained intact until his death at the age
of ninety-three. Here was an issue relatively neglected and surely appro-
priate for study by an aging psychologist-what are the potentials in con-
trast to the liabilities of age, and how might those potentials be increased?
To make practical contact with such issues, I became active in the
committee concerned with the old of the local welfare organization and
later became chairman of such a committee of the state welfare council. I
was a member of the first Ohio governor's commission on age, the first
national conference on aging in Washington, and also joined state and na-
tional adult education organizations. As already mentioned, I initiated and
became first president of the division on maturity and age of the AP A, and
I also became a fellow of the national Gerontological Society. My wife and
I regularly attended meetings of these various groups, expanding the trips
involved (and summer school appointments in California and British Colum-
bia) to visit institutions, housing, recreation centers, other programs for the
aged across the country.
What I saw in these visits and heard discussed in these meetings dis-
appointed me in that the always younger investigators or Senior Center
directors seemed to presume decline, and thus set investigatory tasks or pro-
vided recreational opportunities of a relatively trivial nature. And the usually
well-educated, well-adjusted, and often still-active superior old people were
not seen. About them I especially wanted information.
As a first exploratory effort to find out about them, I asked advanced
students in summer sessions at Ohio State University, the University of
Southern California, and the University of British Columbia to prepare case
studies about the finest old person they had known well and the oldster
most a problem. The able old were a fascinating group, many were employed
either gainfully or in community service activities, had wide interests and
many social contacts; the problem old were lacking especially in these re-
spects (with Elizabeth Simcoe, 1950). Since hiring and retirement policies
seemed of special practical importance, through the University Develop-
ment Fund I obtained several fellowship grants from an interested wealthy
alumnus to investigate these problems.
These studies, in the Columbus area, were intended as a service to the
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 335

cooperating companies as well as research. For instance, a company was re-

tiring its salesmen at sixty-five. But we found that those sixty and over were
outselling those in their thirties by over fifty percent and that turnover was
much more rapid in the younger group; we urged that retirement age might
better be seventy or made flexible. A big establishment shorthanded during
the Korean crisis was venturing to hold workers past seventy; we found evi-
dence that even those retained until seventy-five were doing well, as were
new workers taken on at sixty. A big department store had trouble main-
taining a pool of occasional workers for sales and such rush times as before
Christmas; we showed that older people in this pool remained available about
four times longer and were more often given wage increases than the young
people usually turned to for such work. Several stores permitted older sales-
women to come during the middle of the morning and leave the middle of
the afternoon, thus avoiding rush traffic and filling in over the noon hour;
we found that (for example) the greatest sales in one store were made by
a perky little eighty-year-old with a long-established clientele. Reports were
made to the cooperating companies and ten papers were published about
such work. A later paper brought together many examples of people, from
Churchill to a local barber, still working at eighty and even ninety.
At my suggestion an APA committee was set up (of which I was made
chairman) which circularized psychologists sixty years or older regarding
retirement plans or present activities if already retired. Almost all emeriti
were professionally active in some way, and those not retired hoped then to
be. It was recommended that the AP A appointments office (and department
heads also) give special consideration to emeriti desiring a retirement oppor-
tunity, that possibilities of tapering or flexible retirement be considered, and
that there be a social hour for older psychologists at the annual meetings.
This last was tried for at least two years and seemed much enjoyed by those
attending. A similar paper was published in the American Association of
University Professors' (AAUP) Bulletin, and shortly afterwards a special
office for placement of emeriti in all fields was set up in AAUP headquarters
under subvention of the Ford Foundation; I was on the initial advisory com-
mittee.
In all my research with older workers and also earlier clinical and per-
sonal contacts with the old, I had been much dissatisfied with tests available
for their appraisal. Almost all these tests were devised for use with young
people or derived therefrom or made very artificial so as not to be influenced
by differences in adult experiences. Rather, it seemed to me that tests for
adults should appraise ability practically to interpret such experience. Vari-
ous adults were therefore asked about daily activities and problems met; from
a variety of such matter, some twenty group tests of practical information,
judgement, and social perception were made up and given first trial. And
three were appraised further. Given to various groups including those ad-
mitted to the Ohio penitentiary, steady rises in score were found from the
336 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

twenty through twenty-four to the over-fifty age brackets, but the usual
marked drops were observed on Army Beta, Otis intermediate, and Minne-
sota paper form board tests (with J. A. Demming, 1957). Unfortunately,
the project could not be continued. Such work should be. A young in-
vestigator cannot fairly infer, because oldsters do poorly on such child-play
tasks as an alphabet maze and a puzzle board, that they suffer general loss in
problem-solving ability; perhaps if he were faced with sample problems in
the idiom of oldsters' lives, he would do worse than they!
To search out yet more adequately any possible gains with age (as
perhaps in wisdom, courage, and kindliness, if not more specific abilities) a
grant was obtained from the National Institutes of Health to Iind and study
especially outstanding oldsters in the Columbus metropolitan area. The staff
included two married veterans and the pastor of a local church, all graduate
students specializing in gerontology, and also three very capable older people
widely acquainted and respected in the city-a retired YWCA worker, a re-
tired high school principal, and the wife of a labor leader. The staff met
every Saturday morning. It had initial suggestions concerning oldsters worth
studying and used its acquaintance to get more. I got suggestions from
Faculty Club and community contacts, also in my classes; I was now giving
a seminar on age, had a large evening course on adulthood and age serving
mostly adults, many of these caseworkers dealing with the aged, and another
large evening class on psychology in biography.
There were no medical check-ups, no physical or mental tests: these
could hardly be asked of people like the former dean of the medical school
and president of the American Medical Association, or the former mayor
seen in the home of his son who was a judge. But I had known the dean,
knew the judge and talked with him about his father. Our charming elderly
caseworker became a welcomed guest in each home. Many people knew
such cases; we got much information. The result was a series of nonquanti-
£led but very broad-based personality studies including the following: three
centenarians still largely mentally and characterologically intact but three
other fine old people disintegrated by personal problems; some oldsters
heroically mastering great physical handicap but others mastered thereby;
some continuing usefulness into the nineties but others not useful who
could have been; some more happily social than ever before and others
withdrawing into psychosis. Though the search was always for the superior,
such contrasting cases were also noted, and constructive suggestions were
attempted. Potentials of age seemed often great and means for their realiza-
tion available. In a recent brief paper I have suggested that somewhat as
very carefully selected and trained astronauts explore the outer reaches of
space, so analogously selected "agenauts" (or "agenots") might have the
benefit of every medical and psychological resource to find out what their
greatest potentials may be for length of life, with continuance of well-being
and perhaps usefulness (1963).
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 337

In 1959 I retired at the mandatory age of seventy-with an invitation to

teach the coming year at the University of California in Los Angeles. While
in that area I decided to do some psychological exploring: after spending
so much of my youth in church (and the disillusionment with church
bureaucracy mentioned earlier), for fifty years I had been to no church; I
wondered now what church would seem like? So every Sunday we sampled
around (what better city in which to find variety); and we finally decided
that Unitarianism offered us a liberalism, a companionship with like minds,
and an opportunity to support undertakings of worth, and so we joined.
The next two years (made especially pleasant by my being given an honorary
LL.D. by Ohio State University) were spent back in Columbus doing
research and writing, and then for two years I was a visiting professor at the
University of Arizona. At the 1964 meeting of the APA, the Division of
Educational Psychology gave me the first E. L Thorndike award. In 1965
I was chosen to be a charter member of the new National Academy of
Education. For the past year we tried living in a retirement community to
see whether an elderly gerontologist might find special opportunities there
for both study of and usefulness in age, as we both did. Now we are living
in an apartment near the University where I have a desk and continue
Faculty Club membership and other associations, and here I am writing this
paper-my eighteenth since retirement.
So at seventy-six I look back at my life, trying to decide whether my
psychology helps me understand it. It doesn't, much! It should be evident
to any reader who has stayed with me thus far, that I am a product of the
Puritan ethic of work and hope for a larger usefulness: I hoped that integrat-
ing the study of psychology and psychiatry might yield significant gains in
understanding personality; that teaming together new techniques of cur-
riculum-building, measurement, and educational automation might remake
our schools; that bold action research might reconstitute psychology's contri-
bution to the preparation of teachers; that viewing life in full length and
higher education in relation thereto might substantially improve both edu-
cation and life-planning; that studying the aged both before and after I was
old, and then living with them, might yield more adequate understanding of
age. To each of these undertakings I have devoted myself to the point of
exhaustion, and each one brought disappointment-but perhaps there have
been residual contributions of some value. And I have plans for further
work.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Sidney Leavitt Pressey
Distinctive features in psychological test measurements made upon dementia
praecox and chronic alcoholic patients. J. abnorm. Psychol., 1917, 12, 130-139.
 338 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A comparison of two cities and their school systems by means of a group scale of
intelligence. Educ. Admin. Supervis., 1919, 5, 53-62.
( with L. C. Pressey) Cross-out tests-with suggestions as to a group scale of the
emotions. ]. appl. Psychol., 1919, 3, 138-150.
The influence of color upon mental and motor efficiency. Amer. ]. Psychoi., 1921,
32, 326-356.
( with L. C. Pressey) Introduction to the use of standard tests. N ew York: World,
1922.
(with Bertha Lively) A method for measuring the "vocabulary burden" of text-
books. Educ. Admin. Supervis., 1923. 9, 389-398.
A statistical study of usage and of children's errors in capitalization. English ].,
1924. 13, 727-732.
A simple apparatus which gives tests and scores-and teaches. Sch. & Soc., 1926.
23, 373-376.
(with L. C. Pressey) Mental abnormality and deficiency: an introduction to the
study of problems of 'mental health. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
(with others) Research adventures in university teaching. Bloomington, Ill.:
Public School, 1927.
(with L. C. Pressey) Analysis of 3,000 illegibilities in the handwriting of chil-
dren and adults. Educ. Res. Bull., 1927, 6, 85, 270-275.
A third and fourth contribution toward the coming "industrial revolution" in edu-
cation. Sch. & Soc., 1932, 36,668-672.
(with L. C. Pressey and Elinor J. Barnes) The final ordeal. ]. higher Educ., 1932,
3, 261-264.
(with Per a Campbell) The causes of children's errors in capitalization. English J.
(college edition), 1933, 22, 197-201.
Psychology and the new education. New York: Harper & Row, 1933; rev. ed.
with F. P. Robinson, 1944.
(with N. E. Troyer) Laboratory workbook in applied educational psychology.
New York: Harper & Row, 1936; rev. ed., 1945.
(with J. E. Janney) Casebook of research in educational psychology. New York:
Harper & Row, 1937.
(with J. E. Janney and R. C. Kuhlen) Life: a psychological survey. New York:
Harper & Row, 1939.
(with others) The laboratory concept and its functioning. Educ. Res. Bull., 1940,
19, 187-216.
Fundamentalism, isolationism, and biological pedantry versus sociocultural orien-
tation in psychology. J. gen. Psychol., 1940, 23, 393-399.
Report of the committee on contributions of psychology to problems of preparation
for teaching. l- consult. Psychol., 1942, 6, 165-167.
(with David C. Hanna) The class as a psycho-sociological unit. ]. Psychol., 1943,
16, 13-19.
The new division on maturity and old age: its history and potential service. Amer.
Psychologist, 1948,3, 107-109.
Educational acceleration: appraisals and basic problems. Columbus; Ohio State
University Press, 1949.
Place and functions of psychology in undergraduate programs. Amer. Psychologist,
1949,4, 148-150.
SIDNEY LEAVITT PRESSEY 339

(with Elizabeth Simcoe) Case study comparisons of successful and problem old
people. ]. Geront., 1950, 5, 168-175.
Development and appraisal of devices providing immediate automatic scoring of
objective tests and concomitant self-instruction. ]. Psychol., 1950, 29, 417-447.
War-time accelerates ten years after. J. educ. Psychol., 1955, 46, 228-238.
Concerning the nature and nurture of genius. Scient. Mon., 1955, 81, 123-129.
(with A. W. Jones) 1923-1953 and 20-60 age changes in moral codes, anxieties,
and interests as shown by the "x-o Tests." ]. Psychol., 1955, 39, 485-502.
The older psychologist: his potentials and problems. Amer. Psychologist, 1955, 10,
163-165.
(with R. G. Kuhlen) Psychological development through the life span. New
York: Harper & Row, 1957.
Potentials of age: an exploratory field study. Genet. Psychol. Monogr., 1957, 56,
159-205.
(with J. A. Demming) Test "indigenous" to the adult and older years. J. counsel.
Psychol., 1957, 4, 144-148.
(with F. P. Robinson and ]. E. Horrocks) Psychology in education. New York:
Harper & Row, 1959.
Age and the doctorate, then and now. ]. higher Educ., 1962, 33, 153-160.
Teaching machine (and learning theory) crisis. ]. appl. Psychol., 1963, 47, 1-6.
Most important and most neglected topic: potentials. The Gerontologist, 1963, 3,
69-70.
Psycho-technology in higher education versus psychologizing. ]. Psychol., 1963,
55, 101-108.
(with ]. R. Kinzer) Auto-elucidation without programming. Psychol. in Sch.,
1964, 1, 359-365.
Autoinstruction: perspectives, problems, potentials. 63rd Yearbook of the Nat. Soc.
for the Study of Educ., Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964.
Two basic neglected psychoeducational problems. Amer. Psychologist, 1965, 20,
391-395.
( with Alice D. Pressey) Two insiders' searchings for best life in old age. The
Gerontologist, 1966, 6, 14-17.

Other Publications Cited

Calanter, E. (Ed.) Automatic teaching: the state of the art. New York: Wiley,
1959.
Holland, ]. G. & Skinner, B. F. The analysis of behavior. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1961.
Lumsdaine, A. A. & Glaser, R. (Eds.) Teaching machines and programmed
learning. Washington : National Education Association, 1960.
WolHe, D. Editorial. Science. 1964, 143, 104.
341
Carl R. Rogers
I assume the purpose of an autobiography is to reveal the person as he
is to himself and, either directly or indirectly, to reveal some of the factors
and forces which entered into the making of his personality and his pro-
fessional interests. So perhaps the first question to answer is Who am I?
Who is this person whose life history is to be explored?
I am a psychologist; a clinical psychologist I believe, a humanistically
oriented psychologist certainly; a psychotherapist, deeply interested in the
dynamics of personality change; a scientist, to the limit of my ability in-
vestigating such change; an educator, challenged by the possibility of facili-
tating learning; a philosopher in a limited way, especially in relation to the
philosophy of science and the philosophy and psychology of human values.
As a person I see myself as fundamentally positive in my approach to life;
somewhat of a lone wolf in my professional activities; socially rather shy
but enjoying close relationships; capable of a deep sensitivity in human
interaction though not always achieving this; often a poor judge of people,
tending to overestimate them; possessed of a capacity for setting other people
free, in a psychological sense; capable of a dogged determination in getting
work done or in winning a fight; eager to have an influence on others but
with very little desire to exercise power or authority over them.
These are some of the ways I would describe myself. Others, I am sure,
often see me quite differently. How I became the person I am is something
of which I am not at all sure. I believe the individual's memory of his own
dynamics is often decidedly inadequate. So I shall try to give enough of
the factual data for the reader to draw his own conclusions. Part of this
data consists of the feelings and attitudes which I remember in various
events and periods throughout my life to date. I will not hesitate to draw
some of my own inferences from the data, with which the reader can
compare his own.

EARLY DAYS
Though as a' clinician I feel that the individual reveals himself in the
present and that a true history of his psychogenesis is impossible, I will yield

343
344 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

to the traditional mode and give my own memory and perception of my past,
pegged to such objective facts as are available to me.
I was born January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, the fourth
of six children, five of whom were boys. My parents had both been reared
on farms and were highly practical, "down to earth" individuals. In a day
when college education was not widespread, my father had completed his
engineering degree and even some graduate work at the University of Wis-
consin, and my mother had also attended for two years. In spite of this they
both tended to be rather anti-intellectual, with some of the contempt of the
practical person toward the long-haired egghead. They both worked very
hard and, more important than this, had a strong belief in the virtue of
work. There was almost nothing that a little hard work would not cure.
My mother was a person with strong religious convictions, whose views be-
came increasingly fundamentalist as she matured. Two of her biblical phrases,
often used in family prayers, stick in my mind and give the feeling of her
religion: "Come out from among them and be ye separate"; HAll our right-
eousness is as filthy rags in thy sight, oh Lord." (The first expressed her
conviction of superiority, that we were of the "elect" and should not mingle
with those who were not so favored; the second her conviction of inferiority,
that at our best we were unspeakably sinful.) My father was involved too
in the family prayers, church attendance and the like, but in a less emotional
way. They were both devoted and loving parents, giving a great deal of
time and energy to creating a family life which would "hold" the children
in the way in which they should go. They were masters of the art of subtle
and loving control. I do not remember ever being given a direct command
on an important subject, yet such was the unity of our family that it was
understood by all that we did not dance, play cards, attend movies, smoke,
drink, or show any sexual interest. For some reason swearing was not quite
so strictly tabooed-perhaps because father would, on occasion, vent his
anger in that way.
My father formed his own business-contractor and civil engineer-in
partnership with an older man. Due to hard work (and doubtless good
fortune) the business prospered, and by the date of my birth the early
"hard times" were past and we were a middle-class or upper-middle-class
family. Our home was one of good family times, occasional pleasant gather-
ings of young people (the friends of my oldest brother), and much family
humor which very often had a cutting and biting edge on it. We teased each
other unmercifully, and I did not realize until I was adult that this was not
a necesary part of human relationships.
I learned to read long before I went to school-from my older siblings,
I presume-and was reading heavy Bible story books before I went to hrst
grade at age seven. The principal, being informed of this, took me to the
second, third, and fourth grade rooms for a brief trial at their reading ma-
terial. I could read all of it. Nothing was made, at school or at home, of this
CARL R. ROGERS 345

(as I now realize) rather unusual performance. I was placed in second

grade, which pleased me because I was very fearful of the stern-looking lirst
grade teacher. I soon had a crush on Miss Littler, my teacher. This was re-
peated in lifth grade when I was so devoted to Miss Kuntz that I stayed
after school to help her with tasks around the school room. This was flying
in the face of the family expectation that children came directly home when
school was out. It was perhaps my first minor personal independence.
I was a dreamy youngster all through these grammar school years, so
lost in fantasy most of the time that my absent-mindedness was legendary.
I was teased a great deal about this and called "Professor Moony," an absent-
minded comic strip character of the period. I was buried in books-stories of
Indian and frontier life to the extent that I could lay hands on them, but
anything was grist to my mill. If there was nothing else, I read the encyclo-
pedia or even the dictionary. I can still recall some of the attempts to gain
sex information through these channels, only to come to a dead end at a
crucial point.
I felt guilty about my reading since it so often meant that I was not
doing my "chores," or had blissfully forgotten all the things I had been told
to do. To "have your nose in a book," except perhaps in the evening, was
not a good or practical or hardworking thing. (Years later, as a college pro-
fessor, vaguely guilty feelings would still arise when I sat down to read a
book in the morning!)
I felt that my parents cared more for my next older brother than they
did for me. This feeling must have been quite strong, for I recall that I de-
veloped the theory that I had been adopted. (It was many years later that
I learned how common this fantasy is.) As might be expected, there was
much rivalry and hard feeling between me and this brother, Ross, who was
three years older. There was also, however, much companionship since we
went to school together and shared in many activities. My closest family link
was with my next younger brother, Walter. He and John, my youngest
brother, were less than two years apart in age and were respectively five and
seven years younger than I. In spite of this age difference we were a very
close trio. I had an attitude of real hero-worship toward my oldest brother,
Lester, though the age difference was too great for us to have much com-
panionship. I remember the pride I felt when it was reported in the news-
papers that he had made the highest score of any recruit (on the old Army
Alpha Intelligence Test) at Camp Grant in World War I.
I had almost no social life outside the family, but I have no recollection
of being disturbed by this. Our family life seemed sufficient. I recall just
one list light while in elementary school. I was frightened to death but did
my best in what ended as pretty much of a draw.
I recall one experience which seems to indicate that my parents were
concerned about my withdrawn, dreamy, and impractical nature. At about
the time of my twelfth birthday, while in seventh grade, plans were made
346 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

for me to take a long trip of two or three weeks with my father, while he
visited various construction jobs in the South and East. Permission was ob-
tained for me to leave school on the basis that I would present a written
report of my experience when I returned. Father and I visited New Orleans,
Norfolk. Virginia, and New York City, spending much time visiting con-
struction projects. I enjoyed myself, though I did not become enamored of
engineering as a result. It is only as I look back at this trip that I realize
its unusual nature. I do not recall that my brothers were taken on similar
trips. My best guess is that it was an attempt to help me become more in-
terested in real life than fantasy and to help me become aware of the fact
that the world was one of work and that I should be thinking about my
future occupation. I am not sure that the trip accomplished these aims, but
it was an exciting and broadening experience. I came back thrilled by the
chanting Negro workers on the New Orleans docks and with a passionate
taste (acquired in Norfolk) for raw oysters!
When I was twelve my parents bought a large farm some thirty miles
west of Chicago, and after spending weekends and a summer there, a home
was built and we moved to the country. There were several reasons for this
step. l\1y father liked farming and made a hobby of having the farm handled
in the best scientific fashion. Mother too liked gardening and cared little for
the social life of the suburb. The major reason, however, was that with six
growing children, ranging at that time from six to twenty, they were con-
cerned about the temptations and evils of suburban and city life and wished
to get the family away from these threats.
When we moved to the farm, I loved it. To play in the woods (the
"forest" to me) and to learn the birds and animals was bringing my frontier
stories to life. Many are the Indians I have crept up on, all unsuspecting.
in those wooded glades. What if they were only imaginary? My brothers and
I thoroughly en joyed the new setting.
I recall two events-the first very vividly-occurring before I was fifteen,
which turned me toward the world of science. To provide background for
the first I should say that Gene Stratton-Porter was at that time writing her
<'Girl of the Limberlost" books, in which nature, but particularly the large
night-flying moths, played an important part. I had of course read all these
books. So I was in a responsive mood when I discovered in the woods close
to home, against the dark fissured bark of a black oak tree, two lovely luna
moths, just emerged from their cocoons. These beautiful pale green crea-
tures, large as a small bird, with long "swallowtail" wings spotted with
purple, would have intrigued anyone. They fascinated me. I began my first
"independent study project," as it would be termed today. I obtained books
on moths. I found and raised their caterpillars. I hatched the eggs and raised
caterpillars through their whole series of moults, into the cocoons, until the
twelve-month cycle was complete and they emerged again as moths-Poly-
phemus, Cecropia, Prometheus, or one of the dozens of other varieties I
CARL R. ROGERS 347

carne to know. I even "tied out" a female moth on the roof to attract males-
a very successful experiment-and was continually busy getting leaves of
the special sorts which the caterpillars demanded as food. In my own very
small and specialized field I became something of a biologist.
A less sharply focused experience has to do with scientific agriculture.
My father wanted his farm conducted in the most modern way and brought
in agricultural scientists from the universities to instruct the farm foreman,
herdsman, and others. He also acquired many books on the latest approaches
to agriculture. I can remember reading these books-particularly the heavy
scientific tome by Morison on Feeds and Feeding. The descriptions of all
the scientific experiments on feeding, on milk and egg production, on the
use of different fertilizers, different varieties of seed, of soil, and so forth,
gave me a thoroughgoing feeling for the essential elements of science. The
design of a suitable experiment, the rationale of control groups, the control
of all variables but one, the statistical analysis of the results-all of these
concepts were unknowingly absorbed through my reading at the age of
thirteen to sixteen.
My experience in high school was very fragmented. I attended three
different high schools and in each case had to travel from our farm home to
attend high school-by horse and buggy, by train, by automobile, and com-
binations of these. It was expected that I would return home at once, after
school was over, in order to do chores and work at home. Consequently, I
made no lasting associations or friendships in any of these schools. I was a
good student and never had any difficulty with the work. Neither did I have
any problems in getting along with the other students so far as I can recall.
It is simply that I knew them only in a very surface fashion and felt decidedly
different and alone, but this was compensated for by the fact that my
brother and I went together much of this time and there was always the
family at home.
When I speak of working at home, both morning and night, while
going to high school, I do not mean light work. I was up at five o'clock or
earlier and milked a dozen cows morning and night while attending high
school. I remember this particularly because the milking was evidently more
than my muscles could stand and my hands and arms were continually
"asleep" during the day. I could never get them quite free of the prickles.
I recall that at one time also I took care of all of the pigs on the farm. During
the summer months I rode a cultivator all day long, usually being assigned
to the cornfield at the far end of the farm which was full of quack grass. It
was a lesson in independence to be on my own, far away from anyone else.
When the cultivator needed repair or adjustment, when the team was
troublesome, or the soil or weather conditions not right, I had to make the
necessary decisions and take appropriate action on my own. It was a type of
responsibility experienced by few young people today.
At school my best work was in English and science. I received straight
 348 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A grades in almost all my courses. I remember best Miss Graham, a spinster-

ish teacher of English at Naperville High School. Though she was a strict
disciplinarian and rarely if ever smiled, she had a true scholarly interest in
her work. I somehow felt that she would understand what I wrote, so for
themes in English I wrote personal accounts as well as rebellious papers on
"Shakespeare as an overrated author."
I never had a real "date" in high school. In my junior year I was elected
president of the class (presumably because I had good grades and did not
belong to any of the cliques.') The one social event of the year was a class
dinner to which it was necessary to take a girl. I remember the agony I
went through in inviting an auburn-haired lass whom I had admired from
a distance. Fortunately for me, she accepted. If she had not, I do not know
what I would have done.
There is one summer during this period which tells a great deal about
me and about my upbringing. It was the summer between high school gradu-
ation and the beginning of college. I was seventeen. It was part of the
family tradiiton that of course I would work during the summer. On this
particular occasion my father arranged for me to work in one of a string of
lumberyards throughout the Northwest, owned by three of my uncles. I was
excited by the opportunity of going all by myself to a small town in North
Dakota for the summer. I had been given a graduation present of fifty
dollars and spent it on the beautifully printed, small leather-bound books
which were all the rage at that time. I took my books with me and was
given a room in the lumberyard itself, where I lived and slept, being the
only person on the premises. I worked hard from about eight o'clock in the
morning until five o'clock, loading and unloading lumber, filling customers'
orders, shoveling coal, unloading bricks, and the like. I ate at a boarding-
house and remember no contact beyond superficial conversation with any
of the individuals at the boardinghouse. My relationship with the kindly boss
of the lumberyard was similar. We worked together and I felt he was fair
and friendly. He invited me twice to his house during the summer. Aside
from that I remember no social life at all. I was not too lonely, however,
because I spent the long evenings with my new books. During that period
I read Carlyle, Victor Hugo, Dickens, Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Emerson, Scott, Poe, and many others. I found this most stimulating. I
realize that I lived in a world of my own, created by these books.

COLLEGE

At some point in my high school years I had chosen scientific agri-

culture as my field. I went to the University of Wisconsin in 1919. It was
an appropriate place to go because it had a very good college of agriculture.
This, however, was not my real reason for going to Wisconsin. It was simply
CARL R. ROGERS 349

assumed that every member of the family would go to Wisconsin since my

parents and my two older brothers and sister had all studied there. I roomed
with my next older brother, Ross, at the YMCA dormitory.
Following my own religious inclinations-built on the religious tradi-
tions at home-I became a member of a Sunday morning YMCA group
composed of students of agriculture. Professor George Humphrey was the
leader. I saw him then as a well-intentioned individual but somewhat weak.
To this day I do not know whether he really understood what he was
doing in leaving everything up to the group, but it was (I realize now) an
excellent example of facilitative leadership. Left to our own decisions and
choices, the group set up its own curriculum, organized all kinds of social
and educational activities, conducted its business in first class parliamentary
fashion, discussed topics deeply, and became very close-knit. For the first
time in my life outside of my family I found real closeness and intimacy.
The friendship and companionship which developed in this group of about
twenty-five young men was an exceedingly important element in my life.
We came to know each other well and to trust each other deeply. We were
completely free to engage in any kind of activity and we became involved in
many different types of projects. One of the results was that I acquired a
good grasp of parliamentary law and have never been fearful of chairing
any type of parliamentary assembly, an ability which has from time to time
stood me in good stead. Another experience of that period was that as part
of the activity of this "Ag-Triangle" group, I took on the leadership of a
Boys' Club and tried myself out as leader of a group of younger individuals.
It was during the first summer vacation that I began writing personal
letters to Helen Elliott, a tall, graceful girl interested in art, whom I had
known since grammar school days in Oak Park, where we had ridden our
bicycles together. I had dated her a few times during my freshman year at
Wisconsin since she had come there to study art, and I found her very
attractive.
It was during the Christmas vacation of my sophomore year, I believe,
that I went to a conference of Student Volunteers at Des Moines. The Stu-
dent Volunteer movement had at that time as its slogan, "Evangelize the
world in our generation," and this was a meaningful purpose to me with
my religious interests. The speakers were inspiring and there was a great
deal of mass emotion engendered. I find it embarrassing to read the highly
emotional and idealistic diary I kept during that period. I decided at this
conference that I should change my life goal and go into Christian work.
Though the Student Volunteer movement was specifically oriented toward
the foreign field, I do not recall that I had any particular intention of going
into foreign work. I did, however, feel that religious leadership was now
my goal. In many ways the Student Volunteer movement was the Peace
Corps of that day and appealed to some of the same sentiments.
Having made this decision, agriculture no longer seemed to be a very
 350 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

suitable field. I felt that I should shift to some subject which would prepare
me for the ministry and decided that history, which had always been one
of my interests, was a good background for that type of work. Consequently,
I shifted from agriculture to history.
In the midst of my junior year there occurred a sequence of events
which had a great deal of impact on me. I was selected as one of ten stu-
dents from this country to go to a W orId Student Christian Federation
Conference in Peking, China. When I was informed of this I wept with
joy and surprise. I couldn't understand how or why they would have chosen
me. Realistically, I have realized since that my very active work in the
YMCA, my good grades, and the fact that my parents would be able to
pay most of the expenses of the trip, probably accounted for the choice. At
the time, however, it seemed like an utterly incredible and exciting thing
to be selected from all of the students in the United States for a most un-
usual experience of this sort.
A delegation of students and professional workers, mostly from the
YMCA, went over together on board ship. John R. Mott, who at that time
was a world leader, Professor Kenneth Latourette from Yale, David Porter
of the YMCA, and a number of others constituted the professional group.
The students too were naturally a selected group. Here was a very congenial
intellectual group and our shipboard discussions and reading constituted a
most enriching experience.
I was most privileged to have this whole trip. Wernet highly cultured
and well-informed individuals throughout all our sojourn. The foreign repre-
sentatives of the YMCA were a statesmanlike group in their approach to
intercultural relations. A number of them, such as Jack Childs, became very
well known as philosophers, diplomats, and the like. They were not at all
the evangelical missionary type and I learned a great deal from them.
I was gone more than six months, since in addition to the slow voyage
and the conference in Peking, I was part of one of the delegations which
made speaking tours to student centers-in my case to West China. Follow-
ing this I accompanied Professor Latourette, who was gathering data for a
book, on a tour of South China and the Philippines.
This voyage bears curious testimony to the fact that speed of com-
munication is not always desirable. During the trip I kept a long typed
journal of the various events I was living through and my reactions to them.
I was rapidly becoming much more liberal in religion and politics due to
my exposure to a wide spectrum of opinion, a wide range of cultures, and
to such specifically challenging experiences as trying to understand the
interchange between French and German students and faculty members
who were still filled with hatred and suspicion from the days of World War
I. My intellectual horizon was being incredibly stretched all through this
period, and this growth was recorded in my journal. I sent a copy of this
journal to Helen, who was now definitely my sweetheart, and another copy
CARL R. ROGERS 351

to my family. Since we did not have the benefit of airmail it took two
months for a reply to arrive. Thus I kept pouring out on paper all my new
feelings and ideas and thoughts with no notion of the consternation that
this was causing in my family. By the time their reactions caught up with
me, the rift in outlook was fully established. Thus, with a minimum of
pain I broke the intellectual and religious ties with my home.
This independence was furthered on the return trip, when shipboard
conversations with Dr. Henry Sharman, a student of the sayings of Jesus,
were very thought-provoking. It struck me one night in my cabin that per-
haps Jesus was a man like other men-not divine! As this idea formed and
took root, it became obvious to me that I could never in any emotional sense
return home. This proved to be true.
Due to this six months' trip I had been able freely, and with no sense
of defiance or guilt, to think my own thoughts, come to my own conclu-
sions, and to take the stands I believed in. This process had achieved a
real direction and assurance-which never after wavered-before I had any
inkling that it constituted rebellion from home. From the date of this trip,
my goals, values, aims, and philosophy have been my own and very divergent
from the views which my parents held and which I had held up to this
point. Psychologically, it was a most important period of declaring my inde-
pendence from my family.
A few more comments might be made in regard to my junior and senior
years at Wisconsin. I joined a fraternity, Alpha Kappa Lambda, noted for
its scholastic excellence, in my junior year, in spite of the opposition of my
parents to "frats." I became much involved in my scholastic work and for-
tunately had a number of gifted teachers. Historians Carl Russell Fish,
George Sellery, and Eugene Byrne all had an impact on me. I came to have
a real respect for scholarship and scholarly activities. I did a paper for Pro-
fessor SeHery on "The Source of Authority in Martin Luther." I realize
that the idea I formed at that time-that man's ultimate reliance is upon his
own experience-has been a theme which has stayed with me. I also did a
paper on Benjamin Franklin and an undergraduate thesis on "The Pacifism
of John Wyclif." All of these were highly independent papers in which the
idea was my own and the manner of working was my own. I feel that they
were reasonably scholarly and I learned to use historical research as a way
of exploring my interests and ideas.
Another important experience of those years was my work on the uni-
versity debating team. I found it both surprising and thrilling to realize that
I could tackle a subject on which I knew nothing-in this case the com-
pulsory arbitration of labor disputes-put in eight solid hours a day working
at it over a period of weeks, and come out reasonably "well informed." It
somehow gave me a feeling of confidence in my own ability to tackle a new
intellectual problem and to master it.
Shortly after I returned from the Orient, I was increasingly troubled
352 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by abdominal pains which I had had intermittently since the age of fifteen.
They were now properly diagnosed as being due to a duodenal ulcer, and
I was in the hospital for some weeks and on an intensive treatment regime
for six months. Something of the gently suppressive family atmosphere is
perhaps indicated by the fact that three of six children developed ulcers at
some period in their lives. I had the dubious distinction of acquiring mine
at the earliest age.
During this period of medical treatment it was of course expected, by
me as much as my parents, that I would work. It seems so typical, both of
my own attitudes and those of my family, that the only considered alterna-
tive to college, even though I was not too well, was hard physical work. I
think that to a considerable extent I shared my parents' views that work
would cure anything, including my ulcer. So I obtained a job in a local
lumberyard, while living at home. I remember that one time my model-T
Ford-my £lrst car-was hemmed into a tight parking spot at the lumberyard.
I simply lifted the rear end of the car and moved it a few inches. I strained
my back in doing so. It seemed never to have occurred to me that I could
have asked someone to help me. This attitude, too, has been a typical one
for me.
While working in the lumberyard I made no effort to keep up my college
work, except that I took a correspondence course from the University of Wis-
consin in introductory psychology. This was my £lrst acquaintance with psy-
chology. I was not particularly impressed. I used William James as a text but
thought our assignments were a bit dull. The only portion of the course I
remember is that I got into an argument by mail with my instructor as to
whether dogs could reason. It was his claim that only human beings could
reason. I was quite able to prove to my own satisfaction that my dog, Shep,
was definitely able to solve difficult problems by reasoning!
One advantage of being out of school was that it kept me close to
Helen, who had given up university work to take professional art training
in Chicago. Consequently, there was much courting during this period al-
though each visit involved a thirty-mile drive in my Model-T, over roads
quite different from modern highways, after a hard day's work at the lum-
beryard. I returned to the university in the autumn, but during a visit
home Helen and I became engaged on October 29, 1922, an event which
made me ecstatically happy. I had felt very uncertain that I could win her
and Boated on clouds for some time after this day.
I graduated in June of 1924 with a bachelor's degree in history, having
had my one correspondence course in psychology. I had been delayed one
year in my graduation by my six-month trip to China and by the half year
of illness and work. Because I had shifted from the class of '23 to the class
of '24 and because I had shifted from agriculture to history, the close con-
tacts I had built up in my freshman year were greatly weakened. But I
had friends in the fraternity and good times there. It was still true, however,
CARL R. ROGERS 353

that I had few friends with whom I was close all during the four years of
college.

THE NEW YORK YEARS

Helen and I were married on August 28, 1924, and set out in a second-
hand Model-T coupe of which I was inordinately proud and for which I
had paid $450. We headed for New York and Union Theological Seminary.
My parents had opposed the marriage, not because they were opposed to
Helen, but because it was at that time considered absurd for a man to marry
while he was still going to school. Her parents shared this same feeling.
Helen was at first reluctant to give up her good job as a commercial artist,
but I convinced her that we should be together in facing all the new learn-
ings and challenges of graduate work. We both realized later that we had
been wiser than we knew in making this decision.
I had chosen Union Theological Seminary because it was the most
liberal in the country and an intellectual leader in religious work. Knowing
my plan for going to Union, my father had made one offer which was very
close to a bribe. I suspect he was not proud of himself afterward for this.
Certainly I rejected it indignantly. He told me that he would pay all the
expenses for both of us if I would go to Princeton Seminary, which was at
that point a center of fundamentalist thinking. Instead, I took some compet-
itive examinations and won a good scholarship at Union Seminary and
we made our plans for going there. My parents were then generous in gifts
to help us get underway, though it was still necessary for me to earn a con-
siderable amount of money for our expenses.
Helen and I were both very naive at the time we married (though I
had loaned her a book on sex-life and marriage, a mark of how avant garde
I was in my thinking!). Whether in spite of or because of our lack of
sophistication, we had a delightful honeymoon and it was a great and inde-
pendent venture to drive all the way to New York City in our own car.
We started our life together in a tiny new apartment. At that time
there were no dormitories for married students, and hence we were some-
what separated from my classmates as I began to attend Union Seminary. I
found it to be a stimulating and exciting place. I made friends, found new
ideas, and fell thoroughly in love with the whole experience. Harry Emer-
son Fosdick was in his heyday and his course was one which Helen and I
took together, gaining a feeling for a modern and liberal religion.
Goodwin Watson and Joseph Chassell, both young fellows at that
time, were in charge of a course on "Working with Individuals." In addition
to their own teaching they brought in psychologists and psychiatrists from
the New York area. It was this course which introduced me to the whole
field of clinical work and I found it most exciting. Harrison Elliott and his
 354 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wife (on the faculty of the seminary) were also much involved in both
individual work and the group discussion approach. For the hrst time I
realized that working with individual persons in a helping relationship
could be a professional enterprise.
I had great respect for Arthur Cushman McGiffert, who at that time
was head of the Seminary. He was a remarkable teacher and a profound
scholar. He created an exciting philosophical climate at Union Seminary.
His course on "Protestant Thought before Kant" and other similar courses
introduced me to a new level of teaching excellence. As we heard him
present the thinking of one philosopher or theologian we in the class would
become convinced that. "Aha! This is the person with whom he really
agrees." The next week he would present someone else with equal con-
viction and persuasiveness. In the long run we found that we had to do our
own thinking. (It is of interest to me that Miss Graham in high school and
Professor l\1cGiffert at Union were both grave, scholarly, almost scholastic
teachers; not at all the sort I would tend to select as faculty members today.
Yet they were both highly independent in their thinking and had a deep
respect for the independence of their students.)
While at Union Seminary, either during the hrst or second year, I was
involved in an amusing but highly significant venture. Knowing universi-
ties and graduate schools as I do now-knowing their rules and their rigidi-
ties-I am truly astonished at the freedom which was granted to us at Union.
A group of students, of which I was one, felt that ideas were being fed to
us and that we were not having an opportunity to discuss the religious and
philosophical issues which most deeply concerned us. We wanted to explore
our own questions and doubts and find out where they led. We petitioned
the administration that we be allowed to set up a seminar (for credit!) in
which there would be no instructor and in which the curriculum would be
composed of our own questions. The Seminary was understandably per-
plexed by this request but they granted our petition. The only restriction
was that in the interests of the Seminary a young instructor was to sit in on
the course but to take no part in it unless we wished him to be active. This
seminar was deeply satisfying and clarifying. It moved me a long way
toward a philosophy of life which was my own. The majority of the mem-
bers of that group, in thinking their way through the questions that they
had raised, thought their way right out of religious work. I was one, Theo-
dore Newcomb was another. Various other members of the group have
gone on in sociology and psychology. The whole seminar was very free-
wheeling. It took up profound philosophical, religious, and social problems.
My own reason for deciding at that time to leave the field of religious work
was that although questions as to the meaning of life and the possibility
of the constructive improvement of life for individuals were of deep interest
to me, I could not work in a field where I would be required to believe in
some specified religious doctrine. I realized that my own views had changed
CARL R. ROGERS 355
tremendously already and would very likely continue to change. It seemed
to me that it would be a horrible thing to have to profess a set of beliefs in
order to remain in one's profession. I wanted to find a field in which I
could be sure my freedom of thought would not be limited.
During my second year at Union Seminary I was taking courses both
in the Seminary and in Teachers College, Columbia University, which was
located just across Broadway. At "T. C." I found my course in philosophy
of education with William H. Kilpatrick very stimulating indeed-not only
the lectures and question and answer periods, but also the small group dis-
cussions which were a part of the course. It was my first acquaintance with
the thinking of John Dewey (who has since that time been so generally
misunderstood) and introduced me to a philosophy of education which has
been influential in my thought ever since. A course with Leta Holling-
worth, in clinical psychology, also stands out. She was a warm human being,
concerned about individuals, as well as a competent research worker. It was
under her supervision that I first came in actual clinical contact with chil-
dren-testing them, talking with them, dealing with them as fascinating
objects of study, and helping to make plans for their welfare.
By the end of my second graduate year I decided to shift entirely out
of Union Seminary and over to Teachers College, working in clinical and
educational psychology. Again this was a relatively painless transition since,
as I have indicated, I had already been taking courses there.
Something of my own attitudes during my graduate work may be indi-
cated in my reactions to examinations. I look back on these with some sur-
prise myself. Preparation for examinations was a well-organized affair for
me. It never gave me any trouble because it never entered my head that I
would not be successful. When it came to the matriculation exam for the
doctoral degree, I remember my surprise at discovering that some people
were frightened of this. I took the examination and passed as I had expected
to do. Months later I was amazed to find, quite by chance, that I had the
highest score of that particular group on a Thorndike test of intellectual
power, and also that I had received the highest grades on the content
examina tions.
Perhaps it would be appropriate to try to describe at this point my very
limited experience with educational failure. I remember once in the fifth
grade I failed an examination when I had simply loafed and paid no atten-
tion to a history class. As a consequence, I had to take a second examination
on the same material and I well remember the panic I felt. I even cheated
a little by checking one answer with a girl who was taking the same exami-
nation. The next failure I can recall was a statistics course at Teachers Col-
lege. I had never had a first course in statistics, but I was perfectly confident
that I could pass the second course which came at a more convenient hour.
The instructor was very abstruse in his explanations and I simply could not
catch on. It was a new experience for me to be in a situation where I could
 356 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

not grasp the material. When it came to the final examination I answered
it as best I could but I was sure that I had failed the course. Consequently,
I took the opportunity of telling him, in the examination blue book, what I
thought of the course and his methods of teaching, which were far from
the best. Whether because of this personal outburst or in spite of it, I have
never known which, he passed me.
Our first child, David, was born in 1926, and we experienced all the
excitements, apprehensions, and satisfactions of caring for our first born.
We endeavored to raise him "by the book" of Watsonian behaviorism, strict
scheduling, and the like. Fortunately, Helen had enough common sense
to make a good mother in spite of all this damaging psychological "knowledge."
During these two years in New York, I was working as director of reli-
gious education at a Mt. Vernon church, spending all my weekends there
in order to support myself, my wife, and child. As my own interests changed
away from religion, I became increasingly uncomfortable in this work. I was
pleased to give it up when Goodwin Watson, my brilliant young sponsor,
offered me a job. He always had many irons in the fire, and he turned over
to me almost complete responsibility for an extensive survey he had initiated.
I employed a sizable group of research assistants, conducted the analysis of
some very complex material, and organized and wrote the presentation, all
under pressure of an unyielding and imminent deadline.
I presume it was in the latter part of 1926 that I applied for a fellow-
ship or internship at the new Institute of Child Guidance which was about
to be formed. Child guidance work was just coming into its own and an
elaborate Institute of Child Guidance was established by the Commonwealth
Fund in New York City in order to provide training for such clinical work-
ers. The $2500 fellowship would keep us afloat financially and I would be
working in a field to which I had become increasingly attached. I was
awarded the fellowship. Then shortly before the year was to begin I received
an embarrassed letter from Dr. Frankwood Williams, the psychiatrist who
headed the selection committee. He had just discovered that psychiatrists
were to get $2500. The fellowships for psychologists were to be only $1200.
It was the financial rather than the professional insult which roused my
dander. I wrote him a very strong letter, saying essentially that the fellow-
ship had been awarded, I had been informed of it, I had made all my per-
sonal plans on this basis, and I needed the money to support my family. On
the strength of my letter he made an exception and I received a $2500 fel-
lowship. It is interesting and symbolic that I started my professional training
-through a fluke-on the same level with psychiatric residents.
The year 1927-28 at the Institute for Child Guidance was an extremely
stimulating year. I was still working toward the completion of my doctor's
degree at Teachers College where such things as emotions and personality
dynamics were completely scorned by Percival Symonds and other members
of the Teachers College faculty, and Freud was a dirty word. The whole
CARL R. ROGERS 357

approach was through measurement and statistics. At the new Institute for
Child Guidance the emphasis was primarily an eclectic Freudianism and
contrasted so sharply with the Teachers College approach that there seemed
to be no common meeting ground. I experienced very sharply the tension
between the two views.
I did well at the Institute for Child Guidance. For my doctoral research
I developed a test for measuring the personality adjustment of children (see
1931), building on the attitudes present at the Institute, but also utilizing
some of the technical procedures more congenial to Teachers College. It
amazes me that this test is still used some thirty-five years later. I also began
to realize that I had real clinical skill, both in dealing with individuals and
with colleagues. I remember one case conference with an uncooperative
caseworker from outside, discussing a boy with whom I had been working.
I was late because of a sleet storm that morning. When I arrived the confer-
ence was obviously stalemated because the outside worker was totally un-
sympathetic and uncooperative. I won her over by my explanation of the
situation, though I was the youngest and least experienced member of the
conference group. It was this boy who was the first individual with whom
I carried on regular therapy (though when psychologists did it, it was called
remedial work or some such name). I made real progress in helping him,
though I was full of the psychoanalytic theories which I was trying out at
that time.
The eclecticism of the Institute was very helpful to me in the long run.
There were different shades of psychoanalytic thinking and other psychiatric
and psychological views. Alfred Adler lectured to us, for example, and
shocked the whole staff by thinking that an elaborate case history was not
necessary. I remember how misinformed I thought he must be, since we
routinely took case histories fifty to seventy pages in length. David Levy was
chief of staff and a stimulating leader who introduced us to the then new
Rorschach. E. K. Wickman, the chief psychologist, was thoughtful, bal-
anced, a good research worker, and genuinely interested in discovering the
truth.
As this year drew toward an end, the question of what I would do next
was a very important one. For the Iirst time in my life I was really seeking
a job. By the spring of 1928, David was two years old and our second child
was on the way. Jobs for psychologists were not plentiful. I remember I
was interviewed for a position at Culver Military Academy and felt I might
have to take this. Then I was interviewed for a position at the Rochester
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children which had a Child Study
Department composed of psychologists. I would be studying children and
making recommendations in regard to them. It might even be possible to
see some of them for treatment interviews. This sounded like what I wanted
to do. There were three psychologists in this department and the salary
offered was $2900 per year.
 358 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I look back at the acceptance of that position with amusement and some
amazement. The reason I was so pleased was that it was a chance to do the
work I wanted to do. That it was, by any reasonable criterion, a dead-end
street professionally, that I would be isolated from professional contacts and
universities, that the salary was not good even by the standards of that day,
seems not to have occurred to me, as nearly as I can recall. I think I have
always had a feeling that if I were given some opportunity to do the thing
I was most interested in doing, everything else would somehow take care
of itself.

THE ROCHESTER YEARS

The next twelve years in Rochester were exceedingly valuable ones.
For at least the first eight of these years, I was completely immersed in
carrying on practical psychological service, diagnosing and planning for the
delinquent and underprivileged children who were sent to us by the courts
and agencies, and in many instances carrying on "treatment interviews." It
was a period of relative professional isolation, where my only concern was
in trying to be more effective with our clients. We had to live with our fail-
ures as well as our successes, so that we were forced to learn. There was only
one criterion in regard to any method of dealing with these children and
their parents, and that was "Does it work? Is it effective?" I found I began
increasingly to formulate my own views out of my everyday working ex-
perience.
Three significant illustrations come to mind, all small, but important to
me at the time. It strikes me that they are all instances of disillusionment-
with an authority, with materials, with myself.
In my training I had been fascinated by Dr. William Healy's writings,
indicating that delinquency was often based upon sexual conflict, and that
if this conflict were uncovered, the delinquency ceased. (This at least was
my understanding.) In my first or second year at Rochester I worked very
hard with a youthful pyromaniac who had an unaccountable impulse to set
fires. Interviewing him day after day in the detention home, I gradually
traced back his desire to his sexual impulses regarding masturbation. Eureka!
The case was solved. However, when placed on probation, he again got into
the same difficulty.
I remember the jolt I felt. Healy might be wrong. Perhaps I was learn-
ing something Healy did not know. Somehow this incident impressed me
with the possibility that there were mistakes in authoritative teachings and
that there was still new knowledge to discover.
The second naive discovery was of a different sort. Soon after coming
to Rochester, I led a discussion group on interviewing. I discovered a pub-
lished account of an interview with a parent, approximately verbatim, in
CARL R. ROGERS 359

which the caseworker was shrewd, insightful, clever, and led the interviewee
quite quickly to the heart of the difficulty. I was happy to use it as an illus-
tration of good interviewing technique.
Several years later, I had a similar assignment and remembered this
excellent material. I hunted it up again and reread it. I was appalled. Now
it seemed to me to be a clever legalistic type of questioning by the inter-
viewer which convicted this parent of her unconscious motives and wrung
from her an admission of her guilt. I now knew from my more extensive
experience that such an interview would not be of any lasting help to the
parent or the child. It made me realize that I was moving away from any
approach which was coercive or strongly interpretive in clinical relationships,
not for philosophical reasons, but because such approaches were never more
than superficially effective.
The third incident occurred several years later. I had learned to be
more subtle and patient in interpreting a client's behavior to him, attempting
to time my interpretations in a gentle fashion which would gain acceptance.
I had been working with a highly intelligent mother whose boy was some-
thing of a hellion. The problem was clearly her early rejection of the boy,
but over many interviews I could not help her to this insight. I drew her
out, I gently pulled together the evidence she had given, trying to help her
see the pattern. But we got nowhere. Finally I gave up. I told her that it
seemed we had both tried, but we had failed, and that we might as well give
up our contacts. She agreed. So we concluded the interview, shook hands,
and she walked to the door of the office. Then she turned and asked, "Do
you ever take adults for counseling here?" When I replied in the affirmative,
she said, "Well then, I would like some help." She came back to the chair
she had just left and began to pour out her despair about her marriage, her
troubled relationship with her husband, her sense of failure and confusion,
all very different from the sterile "case history" she had given before. Real
therapy began then and ultimately it was highly successful-for her and for
her son.
This incident was one of a number which helped me to experience the
fact-only fully realized later-that it is the client who knows what hurts,
what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been
deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demon-
strate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the
client for the direction of movement in the process.
While I was in Rochester I had a reasonably comfortable relationship
with the psychiatric profession. We had a consultant psychiatrist in the
Child Study Department. He was a rather weak person and for the most
part we told him what we thought he should say and he said it, thus giving
our recommendations more force and authority. Later when I became direc-
tor of the Child "Study Department, I employed Samuel Hartwell as con-
sultant psychiatrist and I had real respect for him. He was actually able to
 360 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

accomplish things with children which I could not. Later on I employed a

full-time psychiatrist on the staff. I also had many colleague relations with
psychiatrists at the University of Rochester, and these were friendly rela-
tionships until the dispute arose which I will mention later.
It was while I was in Rochester that, due to the interest of another
psychologist in the work of Otto Rank, we decided to bring him there for a
weekend. This was very profitable. I was not too impressed with Rank's
theories but I was very much impressed with his description of his therapy.
By this time some of my own staff workers were also interested in Rank's
work and some of them had taken courses at the Pennsylvania School of
Social Work which was decidedly Rankian in its orientation. All of this had
an important impact on my thinking.
During the summer of 1935 I was invited to teach at Teachers College,
Columbia. I found this highly rewarding and ego strengthening. I was much
surprised that the classes, even though enormous (150 to 300) seemed to
respond to me very favorably and had good learning experiences. My ap-
proach at that time was to give a lecture but with ample opportunity for
questions and discussion from the group. I particularly remember one course
which was broken into thirds. I taught the first part, a much more expe-
rienced psychologist taught the second portion, and I was to teach the third
portion of the course. When I returned for this last portion the class ap-
plauded loud and long when I came in. I was bowled over by the message
that this contained, namely, that they were glad to see me back and really
liked me better than the more experienced faculty member who had been
teaching them. I began to realize not only that I loved to get people excited
about new ideas and new approaches, but that they loved this too.
During 1937 and 1938, the social agencies of Rochester, in which I took
a very active part, decided that a community guidance center was a needed
organization and that the Child Study Department, of which I was the
director, should be its core. The decision was to form a new Rochester Guid-
ance Center. At this point my psychiatric friends made a strong case to the
Community Chest, to my board of directors, and to all who would listen,
that such a clinic should be headed by a psychiatrist. So far as I know there
was little criticism of the job I had done. The argument was simply that a
psychiatrist was in charge of almost all similar clinics in other cities, and
must be in charge here. This led to a prolonged and sometimes bitter battle,
with many facets, which I finally won, becoming the first director of the
Rochester Guidance Center.
During this period I began to doubt that I was a psychologist. The Uni-
versity of Rochester made it clear that the work I was doing was not psy-
chology, and they had no interest in my teaching in the psychology depart-
ment. I went to AP A meetings and found them full of papers on the learning
processes of rats and laboratory experiments which seemed to me to have no
relation to what I was doing. The psychiatric social workers, however,
CARL R. ROGERS 361

seemed to be talking my language, so I became active in the social work

profession, moving up to local and even national offices.
I began to teach courses at the University under the Department of
Sociology on how to understand and deal with problem children. Soon the
Department of Education wanted to classify these as education courses, also.
Before I left Rochester, the psychology department, too, finally requested
permission to list these courses, thus at last accepting me as a psychologist.
Simply writing these paragraphs makes me realize how stubbornly I have
followed my own course, being relatively unconcerned with the question of
whether I was going with my group or not.
In 1940 I accepted a position at Ohio State University as a full profes-
sor. I deeply regretted leaving my newly won position as Director of the
Rochester Guidance Center and might have turned down the offer had it
not been for Helen's gentle insistence in pointing out that I had for a long
time wished to have a university position, and that these did not grow on
trees. So I showed an interest in the offer and finally accepted it. I am sure
the only reason I was considered was my book on the Clinical Treatment
of the Problem Child (1939), which I had squeezed out of vacations and
brief leaves of absence. I heartily recommend starting in the academic world
at the top level. I have often been grateful that I have never had to live
through the frequently degrading competitive process of step-by-step pro-
motion in university faculties, where individuals so frequently learn only
one lesson-not to stick their necks out.
It was in trying to teach what "I had learned about treatment and coun-
seling to graduate students at Ohio State University that I first began to
realize that I had perhaps developed a distinctive point of view of my own,
out of my experience. When I tried to crystallize some of these ideas, and
presented them in a paper at the University of Minnesota in December
1940, I found the reactions were very strong. It was my first experience of
the fact that a new idea of mine, which to me can seem all shiny and glow-
ing with potentiality, can to another person be a great threat. To find my-
self the center of criticism, of arguments pro and con, was disconcerting and
made me doubt and question. Nevertheless I felt I had something to con-
tribute, and wrote the manuscript of Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942),
setting forth what I felt to be a somewhat more effective orientation to
therapy. I also included the first complete verbatim case, electronically re-
corded and laboriously transcribed.
Here again I realize with some amusement how little I have cared
about being "realistic." When I submitted the manuscript, the publisher
thought it was interesting and new, but wondered what classes would use it.
I replied that I knew of only two-a course I was teaching and one in an-
other university. The publisher felt I had made a grave mistake in not
writing a text which would fit courses already being given. He was very
dubious that he could sell 2000 copies, which would be necessary to break
 362 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

even. It was only when I said I would take it to another publisher that he
decided to make the gamble. I don't know which of us has been more sur-
prised at its sales-nearly 80,000 and still continuing.
I had arrived at Ohio State at an opportune time. Many graduate stu-
dents had been thoroughly trained in a largely laboratory approach which
they found unexciting. When I came upon the scene-a psychologist inter-
ested in working with real human beings-they flocked to my seminars and
courses and many asked me to sponsor their doctoral researches. I was too
naive to realize that by accepting them for sponsorship I was stirring up
jealousies in the other faculty members. On the other hand, many of my
lifelong friendships were formed in my dealings with this choice group of
doctoral students.
I have been told that the practicum in counseling and psychotherapy
which I established in 1940 was the first instance in which supervised ther-
apy was carried on in a university setting-that neither Freud nor any other
therapist had ever managed to make supervised experience in the therapeu-
tic relationship a part of academic training. I am not certain that this state-
ment is true. I do know, however, that I had no such brash thought in mind
when I inaugurated this practicum. It simply seemed essential that if stu-
dents were to study therapy they must also carry it on and should have the
opportunity to analyze and discuss what they were doing. Nearly all of the
discussion was based on recorded interviews, and this was an exciting ven-
ture for the whole group. I realize now that too much of our discussion dealt
with individual responses and with techniques, but nonetheless it was a
growing experience for all of us.
I was much involved in professional activities during my Ohio State
years. I plunged into the newly formed American Association for Applied
Psychology, became chairman of its clinical division, and president in 1944-
45. Meanwhile Robert Yerkes was arguing that if the parent organization,
the AP A, could be reorganized so as to be democratic in its structure, all of
psychology might again be brought together. I was responsive to this and
there were many meetings involving Yerkes, Hilgard, Boring, and various
others which laid the basis for a constitutional convention and the eventual
reunification of psychology. It was a privilege to be involved in this states-
manlike enterprise.
Though Columbus was our home for only five years, it seems longer
because it was a period of intense growth for the whole family. We built
and enjoyed our own home, and it was a period rich in friendships. David
and Natalie, our children, went through their adolescence here. David
pointed toward medicine and has gone on to an outstanding career as chair-
man of the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. Natalie be-
came sensitively involved in art, the teaching of art, and psychology, with
a special interest in interpersonal relationships. She has continued all these
interests, adding to them the responsibilities of a wife and mother. Among
 CARL R. ROGERS 363
other things, she helped her active professor husband, Lawrence Fuchs, to
establish the Peace Corps in the Philippines. She is now working in the
child guidance field as well as being involved in her husband's wide-ranging
activities. We have had enormous satisfaction in the integrity and sensitivity
of our children. But this gets somewhat ahead of my story.

THE MOVE TO CHICAGO

I was Battered to be invited to teach at the University of Chicago dur-

ing the summer of 1944. Toward the end of the summer, Ralph Tyler, who
held several important posts at the University, surprised me by extending an
invitation to come to Chicago permanently and establish a counseling center
there. This was a very appealing offer. I could not accept it for the coming
year because I was already committed to aid the war effort by teaching simple
counseling methods to the staff members of the USO, whose staff was being
besieged by servicemen with personal problems. I did, however, accept a
professorship in psychology and the responsibility of establishing a counsel-
ing center, my duties to begin in the autumn of 1945.
In August of 1944, before I left Chicago, Dr. Tyler and Lawrence
Kimpton, then Dean of Students, asked me to draw up a memorandum as
to my views regarding a possible university organization for the counseling
of students. This memo was written for university administrators-non-psy-
chologists all-but I am quoting from it here because it served as the basis
for the development of the Center a year later.

The primary purpose of the student counseling organization is to assist the

student to help himself, to aid him in becoming more intelligently self-directing.
In order to achieve this goal, the purpose of the counselor is to create a situ-
ation of deep understanding and acceptance which will enable the student to think
through his problems and perplexities more clearly, and to direct himself more
intelligently and rationally, as a result of this counseling experience.
It is the purpose of the student counseling organization to deal with the
student as a total individual. There is no attempt to treat the individual as a
bundle of separate parts-educational problems, vocational problems, social prob-
lems, etc. There is a clear recognition that difficulties in adjustment are difficulties
in adjustment of the whole individual.
It is not the purpose of the counselor to assume responsibility for the life of
the student, nor to control him in the ways in which the counselor or others re-
gard as satisfactory. Neither is it the purpose of the counselor to control the stu-
dent's environment by manipulating the curriculum, rules, or other factors so as
to make it possible for the student to adjust.
In short, the counselor controls neither the student nor the college environ-
ment. Rather the counselor provides a situation in which the student may work
out clearly and independently the adjustment to his college experiences and to
 364 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
later life which is realistic for him and which satisfies his own desire for increas-
ing maturity.
It is the purpose of the student counseling organization to be freely avail-
able to the student. The counselor should be physically and psychologically ac-
cessible. How many counselors there should be in order to be satisfactorily acces-
sible remains to he seen.
The criterion of success of the counseling organization will not lie in elabo-
rateness or completeness of the records, nor in the complexity of organizational
machinery, but in the feeling of the student that he has achieved a satisfying
plan of action for himself.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE

COUNSELING CENTER

The development of the Counseling Center-its staff, its therapeutic

principles, its research, its administrative procedures-was a most exciting
process. I believe I learned more and contributed more during the twelve
years at the Center (1945-1957) than at any other period. I learned to set
the staff free, to make all of us jointly responsible for the work of, the wel-
fare of, and the future of the Counseling Center. It was a period in which
our basic views about the helping relationship came to fruition. These views
developed out of a heavy service function. The Center had 2800 counseling
interviews with 605 individuals during its first ten months of work and the
number steadily increased after that. It was a time of innovation in our
educational methods and in our freewheeling administrative process. It was
a germinal period for research hypotheses and theoretical formulations. Al-
though our efforts were essentially task oriented, we were also experimenting
with much freedom of expression of interpersonal feelings (negative and
positive) in our staff meetings and staff relationships. Hence, without con-
sciously planning it, the staff became a very close and personally nourishing
group. Graduate students, clerical staff, and faculty members worked as
equals in our undertakings. There was enormous freedom for creativity. I
think it is safe to say that anyone who worked for as much as a year in that
climate, regards his time there as one of the most significant experiences of
his life.
Some of the closeness of the group grew out of the fact that though
Deans Tyler and Strozier gave us complete freedom and solid backing, we
lived in a general University context of skepticism, criticism, and strong
antagonism. The antagonism was mostly from the Department of Psychi-
atry, in which successive chairmen strongly rejected each of our bids for
better relationships and cooperation. Our relationship with the Department
of Psychology was friendly and gradually became close under the chairman-
ship of James Miller.
For myself, this was the period when I wrote Client-centered Therapy
CARL R. ROGERS 365
( 1951 ), many papers, and formulated a precise statement of my whole
theoretical position, which was first widely distributed in duplicated form
for criticism and was finally published as a long chapter in Sigmund Koch's
mammoth series, Psychology: A Study of a Science (1959).
It was also a period in which my dreams of research in psychotherapy
came true. Up to this point I had been unable to get more than piddling
amounts for research, but with Dr. Miller's assistance we obtained a large
grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and this was followed by other
grants. These funds enabled us to carry out the dozen or more coordinated
investigations which we reported in the volume Psychotherapy and Person-
ality Change (1954). Other studies followed.
During these years I sponsored many fine graduate students who have
gone on to make significant records for themselves. The staff and students
contributed greatly to my personal growth, to the greater depth I was achiev-
ing in therapeutic relationships, to my development as a facilitative admin-
istrator, and to the enrichment of my theories about therapy and interper-
sonal relationships.
I would like to mention a few of those who have contributed most
significantly to my own thinking and development, listing them roughly in
the order in which I came to know them: Victor Raimy, Thomas Gordon,
E. H. Porter, Jr., William Snyder, Donald Grummon, Nicholas Hobbs,
Arthur Combs, George Muench, John Butler, Julius Seeman, Oliver Bown,
Nathaniel Raskin, Douglas Blocksma, Stanley Lipkin, Bill Kell, Louis
Cholden, John Shlien, Elaine Dorfman, Eugene Gendlin, Gerard Haigh,
Richard Hogan, Madge Lewis, Desmond and Rosalind Cartwright, Richard
Farson, Godfrey Barrett-Lennard, Jerome Berlin, Leif Braaten.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AT CHICAGO

My manner of conducting courses had never been orthodox, but at

Chicago I became more and more radical. The hypothesis which came to be
central to me is the first one presented in the chapter on "Student-centered
Teaching" in Client-centered Therapy. It is that "We cannot teach another
person directly; we can only Facilitate his learning." This hypothesis had
grown largely out of my therapeutic experience, and I endeavored increas-
ingly to find new methods of implementing it. Even in large courses where
some presentation of issues at least seemed essential, I found ways of setting
students free to pursue their own goals and providing the resources from
which they could learn. My classes became exciting clusters of small groups,
informing themselves in depth on topics of real interest. To find themselves
set free was often a shocking experience. One outstanding student, who
later became a leader in the Counseling Center, withdrew from his initial
course with me, saying in disgust to his companion, "That son-of-a-bitch
 366 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

calls himself a teacher!" Yet the ferment he had felt continued to work in
him until he returned more than a year later. This same phenomenon oc-
curred in a Harvard conference on teaching in 1952. I presented a ten-
minute paper ("Some Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning") in
order to initiate a discussion. It is hardly correct to say that it initiated a dis-
cussion-it set off an explosion! Yet, constructive reverberations from that
paper (included in On Becoming a Person, 1961) continue to this day.
Though I shall not further discuss this aspect of my interests, my con-
cern with what I believe is a much needed revolution in education at all
levels has continued. I have tried increasingly to point out and to demon-
strate that we do not need teaching, as that term is ordinarily used or de-
fined in the dictionary. What is needed, from nursery school to the Ph.D.,
is an intelligent and resourceful facilitation of learning.
Especially during the early portion of my Chicago years, I was ex-
tremely active in professional affairs. I was president-elect of the AP A in
1945-46, and president in 1946-47. These were years of great change and
expansion in psychology following the war, and I was deeply involved in
formulations regarding clinical training, the formation of the American
Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology, and the continuing attempt
to resolve the tensions between psychiatry and psychology.
For my presidential address in 1947, I determined to try to work out
and present my emerging views regarding the importance of the phenomeno-
logical world of the individual as a source of data, and the centrality of the
self-concept as the determiner of behavior. Because I was in the midst of
struggling with these new ideas, the paper ("Some Observations on the
Organization of Personality") is not a masterpiece of clarity. It did, however,
push forward into areas which have since received much more recognition.
I felt it was neither understood nor well received by psychologists. In fact,
I have one vivid memory of this. Following the address in a beautiful audi-
torium in Detroit, Chairman John Anderson and I went to the men's room
which was crowded with psychologists, buzzing loudly with talk. When I
entered, all conversation stopped. The silence was deafening. I felt I had
interrupted many highly critical comments. I received very few congratula-
tions, and it is only the increasing number of times that this paper has been
selected for books of readings in psychology which has given me the feeling
that though it was perhaps a somewhat groping first attempt, it has come
to be recognized as at least a significant groping.

A PERIOD OF PERSONAL DISTRESS

There were two years while I was at Chicago which were years of
intense personal distress, which I can now look back upon coolly but which
were very difficult to live through.
CARL R. ROGERS 367

There was a deeply disturbed client (she would be regarded as schizo-

phrenic) with whom I had worked at Ohio State, who later moved to the
Chicago area and renewed her therapeutic contacts with me. I see now that
I handled her badly, vacillating between being warm and real with her, and
then being more "professional" and aloof when the depth of her psychotic
disturbance threatened me. This brought about the most intense hostility
on her part (along with a dependence and love) which completely pierced
my defenses. I stubbornly felt that I should be able to help her and per-
mitted the contacts to continue long after they had ceased to be therapeutic,
and involved only suffering for me. I recognized that many of her insights
were sounder than mine, and this destroyed my confidence in myself, and
I somehow gave up my self in the relationship. The situation is best summa-
rized by one of her dreams in which a cat was clawing my guts out, but
really did not wish to do so. Yet, I continued this relationship, destructive
to me, because I recognized her desperately precarious situation, on the
brink of a psychosis, and felt I had to be of help.
Gradually I realized I was on the edge of a complete breakdown myself
and then suddenly this feeling became very urgent. I had to escape. I am
everlastingly grateful to Dr. Louis Cholden, the promising young psychiatrist,
who was working in the Counseling Center at that time, for his willingness
to take over the client on an hour's notice. She, within moments, burst into
a full blown psychosis, with many delusions and hallucinations. As for me,
I went home and told Helen that I must get away, at once. We were on
the road within an hour and stayed away two or three months, on what we
can now calmly refer to as our "runaway trip." Helen's quiet assurance that
I would come out of this distress in time and her willingness to listen when
I was able to talk of it, were of great help. However, when we returned I
was still rather deeply certain of my complete inadequacy as a therapist, my
worthlessness as a person, and my lack of any future in the field of psychol-
ogy or psychotherapy.
For a time before I left, I was in therapy with one member of my staff.
When I returned I felt my problems were so serious it would only be threat-
ening to ask a staff member to help me with them. I am deeply grateful
that one member of our group simply told me that it was obvious I was in
deep distress, that he was not afraid of me or my problems, and that he was
offering me a therapeutic relationship. I accepted in desperation and gradu-
ally worked through to a point where I could value myself, even like my-
self, and was much less fearful of receiving or giving love. My own therapy
with my clients has become consistently and increasingly free and spon-
taneous ever since that time.
I have often been grateful that by the time I was in dire need of per-
sonal help, I had trained therapists who were persons in their own right, not
dependent upon me, yet able to offer me the kind of help I needed. I have
since become rather keenly aware that the point of view I developed in
 368 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

therapy is the sort of help I myself would like, and this help was available
when I most needed it.

A BROADENING VISTA

During these Chicago years, I had many choice opportunities for gain-
ing a broader perspective, both personally and professionally. During various
summers I taught at UCLA, Harvard, Occidental College, Brandeis Univer-
sity, and spent a visiting semester at the University of California at Berkeley.
While there I counseled a client in front of my large seminar group for
about ten sessions, an experience which I think none of us have forgotten.
It was in these years also that Helen and I began to take the winter
quarters off, getting away from the cold and slush of Chicago to various
isolated hideaways in Mexico and the Caribbean where no one knew I was
a psychologist. Here, snorkeling, painting, and color photography appeared
to be my major activities. Yet in these spots, where I almost never put in
more than four hours a day in professional work, I have produced, I believe,
some of my most creative and solid writing. It is when I am alone, when
there is neither physically nor psychologically anyone "looking over my
shoulder" that I have done some of my best work.

WISCONSIN

I was invited to spend one semester in the Department of Education at

the University of Wisconsin in the spring of 1957 as the honorary Knapp
Professor for that period. The individual who sponsored this idea, and worked
hard to bring it about, was Virgil Herrick, a dynamic professor of education
whom I had known previously, but who was to become one of my very
closest personal friends during the ensuing years.
The five-month appointment was a fruitful one. I held a seminar for
faculty members in which I was, I fear, rather rigidly "student-centered."
I had not yet learned how to place full responsibility with the group and
yet give freely of myself -.Nevertheless it was an exciting and unusual expe-
rience for most of the participants. I also held a large seminar for graduate
students in counseling, psychology, and education. This was highly success-
ful and, judging from letters over the years, had _a significant impact on the
lives of the members. During this time, Helen and I had many warm per-
sonal and social contacts with faculty members in education, psychiatry, and
with several of the psychologists.
These months gave me a great deal of time for my own work. I listened
to dozens of recorded therapeutic interviews, seeking for the elements of the
process of therapy. I determined to make this the subject of my paper before
the AP A, the paper demanded of each recipient of the AP A Distinguished
CARL R. ROGERS 369

Scientific Contribution Award, which I had received in 1956. As with my

AP A presidential address, I was still struggling with emerging ideas as I
tried to meet the deadline, but the paper, "A Process Conception of Psycho-
therapy" (1958), has since stimulated many research investigations and a
number of instruments for measuring process movement in psychotherapy.
Meanwhile, Virgil Herrick was working devotedly and selflessly behind
the scenes to bring me to Wisconsin. I had assured him that nothing could
lure me from Chicago, and he had challenged me to write out the descrip-
tion of a position which would entice me. I wrote a description of an impos-
sible position-appointments in both psychiatry and psychology, opportunity
to train psychologists and psychiatrists, time for therapy and research with
psychotic and normal individuals (the two extreme groups where I felt my
experience was deficient), and other improbable requirements. To my amaze-
ment, he was able to bring this about, though the approval of ten separate
committees, besides his persuasive talks with many individuals, was neces-
sary to achieve this.
This faced me with a difficult decision. I felt I could continue at Chi-
cago along the same lines I had been following, but I could go little further.
I could continue to have the encouraging environment of the Counseling
Center which had permitted my ideas to grow. Or I could launch out into
a skeptical psychology department and a somewhat skeptical department of
psychiatry, and try to establish myself and my ideas in a more pervasive
setting. I could also have the opportunity to pursue research with psychotic
individuals, which I felt was my next challenge. In addition, we would have
a more pleasant and friendly environment for living. We decided to accept.
The staff members of the Counseling Center were incredulous and
greatly upset. They found it hard to understand my view that I had con-
tributed what I could at Chicago, that the Counseling Center was a vigor-
ous and viable organization (which it has proven to be), and that for my
own personal growth and development it was challenging to move on. De-
spite their protests, I held to my decision.
So in the late summer of 1957 we moved to Madison, where for seven
years we enjoyed gracious living in a beautiful home of contemporary archi-
tecture, situated on the shore of Lake Monona, and where we made many
very close and dear friends and .thoroughly enjoyed our personal experiences.
Professionally there were ups and downs. It was the first time in my
professional life that I tried to be a member only, rather than a leader. I did
not do too well in several respects. In psychiatry I tried to play down any
leadership role on my part. This submerging of myself was probably not
quite genuine and made some members suspicious of me. I was also frankly
appalled at the poor caliber of the psychiatric residents, in comparison with
graduate students in psychology. However, by the end of the seven years,
many changes had come to pass, due in large measure to Dr. Robert Roes-
sler, chairman during most of that period. The caliber of residents greatly
improved, I was doing a much better job of stimulating their learning in my
370 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

time with them, and much research, which had been almost nonexistent at
the time of my arrival, was being carried on.
In psychology I had an ample number of students in my seminars and
under my sponsorship, and I enjoyed them. I had had few illusions about
the attitudes of the department in general, which was highly laboratory
oriented and very distrustful of clinical psychology. But I had felt that it
would be healthy for students working with me to have laboratory as well
as clinical training and believed that I could carve out an area of interest
in which my students and I could work together, engaging both in clinical
practice and in research.
What I did not foresee or recognize was that the department had come
to place such stress on "rigorous" examinations, on failing large proportions
of students, that no one in any field could turn out a significant number of
Ph.D.'s. In the department as a whole-though it took me a number of years
to recognize this-about one out of seven of our carefully selected graduate
students ever received the Ph.D. Some were failed, some of the most creative
minds and the best clinicians left in disgust, and I was in the peculiar posi-
tion of training graduate students who had only a minute chance (a chance
which did not have too much to do with merit) of obtaining a degree. I
made every effort in my power to change what appeared to me as both an
incredibly wasteful and foolishly punitive system, but without avail. A
majority of the department would put through some liberalizing change,
only to have it negated by some new policy Call of course in the interest of
"high standards")' In April of 1963 I finally resigned from the department,
retaining only my appointment in psychiatry. I felt I would be lacking in
integrity to do otherwise. As persons, the members of the department consti-
tuted an interesting and often likable lot. Collectively, they were destroying
everything I valued in the development of scientists and practitioners.
Meanwhile, I was deeply involved in research. After a considerable
period of planning and fund raising, I began assembling a small and devoted
staff for the most complicated and difficult research of my life-a study of
the impact of the therapeutic relationship upon relatively chronic hospital-
ized schizophrenic patients. The difficulties of implementing such a study
were fantastic but it was at last launched. I am tempted to mention the
names of those who contributed the most, but since more than 200 indi-
viduals were eventually involved it is impossible to know where to stop.
But there were Haws in the way I organized the research staff; Haws
which were to be nearly fatal. Because I was spread too thinly over many
activities, I did not take the time to develop a staff which was unified in
philosophy and outlook, as at the Counseling Center. The task was so large,
it seemed there was hardly time for this. Although I wished the group to be
responsible for itself, I did not devote time enough or energy enough to
implement this, so that the staff never felt completely responsible for itself
and its activities.
CARL R. ROGERS 371

Consequently, when an important member of the group engaged in be-

havior which I (and others) regarded as unethical, there was not a solid basis
for handling this. The fact that most of the turmoil which then occurred
happened while I was away for a year at Palo Alto, multiplied the problems.
My difficulty in believing that a person I had known and trusted as an
effective colleague might also be unethical made me vacillate in my own
attitudes. Because of the emergency I tried to pull back some of the author-
ity, which I had freely given to the group, into my own hands. This was
a grave mistake also. The ensuing uproar, recriminations, disappearance of
data, misunderstandings, and involvement of many outsiders constitutes with-
out doubt the most painful and anguished period in my whole professional
life. The major portion of the research analysis had to be completely redone,
at the insistence of the staff. I agreed to its necessity, but was skeptical that
we had the time and strength to do it. It was, however, achieved, and a
fearfully complex investigation, developed and reported by many members of
the staff, is at long last ready for publication. I hope it will prove to be
worth the suffering it has caused so many people.
There were, fortunately for my personal balance, many positive events
occurring during this period. Two occurred during the summer of 1960. I
was a leader in a ten-day workshop at the University of Denver for influ-
ential young men in the field of college counseling and personnel work.
This was successful beyond our hopes, and was a most satisfying experience.
Following this, Helen and I retreated to a lovely log home near Estes
Park, built sixty years earlier, and in a three-week period I drew together
the material for my book, On Beco-ming a Person (1961). This book had
been germinating in my mind and my notes for several years but the final
selection of the papers, the editing out of overlap, the writing of material
which would introduce and link the papers, was all accomplished in these
three intense weeks. Even so I found time to hike in the rocky peaks behind
the cabin, enjoying the deer and other wildlife which were plentiful.
During the summer of 1961 we embarked on a trip to Japan, a goal for
which a group of Japanese had been toiling long and hard. On the way
over, on a Japanese freighter, I prepared for the lectures and workshops
which I was to hold. In Yokohama I was met by Logan Fox, an American
born and brought up in Japan but very familiar with my work, who was to
serve as my exceedingly able interpreter and friend, and Mr. Endo, a Japa-
nese counselor who had gradually developed his own type of helping rela-
tionship, only to be greatly strengthened in his approach when he learned
of my work. During a seven-week period I conducted five one-week work-
shops for college counselors, industrial executives, and individuals in the
correctional and probation fields, as well as giving many lectures. I was
flattered at being one of the few Americans brought to Japan on Japanese
funds. I came to know some very dedicated counselors and therapists. I
came to understand why, to a Japan seeking new directions and a new
 372 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

philosophical base, my work was extremely important. (Though I am still

overawed by the fact that there will soon be sixteen volumes of my books
and articles in Japanese translation!) It was an exciting, hard-working sum-
mer, in which we came into close contact with a culture so vastly different
from our own that we could not truly understand it. But in the therapeutic
relationship, I was most interested to see that individuals, Oriental or Occi-
dental, appeared to go through the same process of personal exploration and
reorganiza tion.
The year 1962-63 I spent as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. It was in many ways a meaningful
and stimulating year, but the greatest single impact on me was my close
contact with two Britons, Michael Polanyi, the physicist turned philosopher
of science, and Lancelot Whyte, the historian of ideas. I was excited to find
that many of my own developing ideas regarding the unfortunate and out-
of-date philosophy of science to which American psychology seems com-
mitted were not only shared but strongly reinforced by these men who were
much more competent scholars in the field than 1. Another important influ-
ence was my contact with Erik Erikson, a splendid person whose very ap-
pearance is therapeutic, and several other psychoanalysts, foreign as well as
American. From them I learned what I had strongly suspected-that psycho-
analysis as a school of thought is dead-but that out of loyalty and other
motives, none but the very brave analysts mention this fact as they go on
to develop theories and ways of working very remote from, or entirely op-
posed to, the Freudian views.
Before returning to Wisconsin, I had obtained from the president of
the University permission to conduct a continuing, interdepartmental, non-
credit seminar, open to both faculty and graduate students. After resigning
from Psychology, I felt that I would like an opportunity to facilitate real
learning in a way which would cut across all boundaries and which would
be free of the horribly constricting influence of evaluation, grades, and
degrees. I decided upon the topic "the philosophy of the behavioral sciences,"
for the first semester. There were so many who applied that the seminar
could accommodate less than half, and still was too large. It was, partly be-
cause of its size, not entirely successful, but it was a stimulating experience
for almost all and a beginning experiment in breaking the lock-step of
American graduate education.

THE WESTERN BEHAVIORAL

SCIENCES INSTITUTE

Quite unwittingly I had had a part in the formation of an adventurous

new organization on the cutting edge of the behavioral sciences. Richard
 CARL R. ROGERS 373
Farson, Thomas Gordon, and I had conducted a workshop in human rela-
tions in California in the summer of 1958. Dr. Paul Lloyd, a California In-
stitute of Technology physicist who had become increasingly interested in
the field of interpersonal relationships, was one of the participants. As a
result of many discussions following that workshop, Farson and Lloyd
founded the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, a nonprofit organiza-
tion devoted to humanistically oriented research in interpersonal relation-
ships, with a particular focus on the manner in which constructive change
in interpersonal relationships comes about. At the time of its establishment
in 1959, I accepted their invitation to serve on its board of directors. My
motive was to encourage what seemed to me to be a pioneering venture in
an area in which pioneering is often unwelcomed by established institutions.
From the first, Farson, whom I had known for many years, urged me
to come out as a Visiting Fellow, to join the staff, or in any other way I
chose to affiliate more closely than as a remote board member. I had never
accepted any of these invitations, partly because of other obligations, partly
because I felt that my contribution could certainly best be made through a
university. While I was at the Center in Stanford in 1963, he repeated over
the phone this invitation to join their staff. I gave my stock response but
later began to mull over the question. What was a university, at this stage
of my career, offering me? I realized that in my research it offered no par-
ticular help; in anything educational, I was forced to fit my beliefs into a
totally alien mold; in stimulation, there was little from my colleagues be-
cause we were so far apart in thinking and in goals. On the other hand,
WBSI offered complete freedom from bureaucratic entanglements; the stim-
ulation of a thoroughly congenial interdisciplinary group; the opportunity to
facilitate learning without becoming entrapped in the anti-educational jungle
of credits, requirements, examinations, more examinations, and grudgingly-
granted degrees. As Helen and I talked it over, we were very reluctant to
leave our Madison friends and our lovely home, but I recognized that pro-
fessionally I could now leave university life without too much regret, and
that from a realistic point of view I would have a much deeper membership
in a "community of scholars" at WBSI than at any university I knew. So we
decided to make the move, beginning our new life in January, 1964.
Our wildest hopes have been exceeded. I could not have believed, in
advance, how much relief I would feel on being freed from the constric-
tions of university life. I have always done pretty much what I wanted to
do, but I have had to discover that doing what you want to do, against
skepticism and opposition, is a very different thing from doing what you
want to do in an atmosphere of encouragement and congenial interdis-
ciplinary stimulation. I have been more creative and productive than I have
been for years. Curiously enough, I have had deeper and much more sig-
nificant contact with faculty members and more significant contact with
 374 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

eager learners than I have ever experienced before. This demands a word of
explanation.
Having completed our work with schizophrenics, I have been eager to
turn to working with "normal" individuals-the other end of the spectrum.
A potent way of doing this, as I learned as early as 1950, is through the in-
tensive group experience (often called a workshop, or a T-group, or a basic
encounter group). So I have held intensive workshops of from two-and-one-
half to ten days in length, with graduate students, faculty members, business
executives, therapists (psychologists and psychiatrists), government officials,
executive leaders with their spouses, and others, in this country as well as
in Australia, Japan, and France. The impact has been striking for them
and rewarding to me. In a very real sense it has been an adaptation of my
therapeutic approach to the facilitation of learning and the self-enhancement
of the well-functioning person. It involves feelings as well as cognition, ex-
periencing as well as ideas, learning by the whole person as contrasted to
learning "from the neck up." It involves intensive experience in a group
rather than the spaced contacts of individual therapy. I am embarked on a
study of the process in such basic encounter groups that I hope may eventu-
ate in theoretical propositions which can be tested empirically.
As to my contacts with faculty members, I have had a continuing con-
sultant relationship to the California Institute of Technology, in which I
have spent many, many hours in intensive discussion with a group of twenty
faculty members around profound issues in education-the preservation
and enhancement of creativity, the development of persons rather than tech-
nicians, the many ways of facilitating learning, the crippling effect of over-
stress on grades, and so forth. To a lesser degree I have had this type of
contact with the faculty of Lewis and Clark College in Portland and with a
faculty group at Sonoma State College. So I feel definitely fulfilled in my
opportunities to explore deeply, with other faculty members, the basic issues
in education today.
I have also had the opportunity to freely pursue my second major cur-
rent interest in the assumptions and philosophy of the behavioral sciences.
A seminar with behavioral scientists, psychological practitioners, physicists,
philosophers, and others was a beginning. We have held a small delibera-
tive conference composed of outstanding individuals in the field, including
Michael Polanyi. But since the fruition of much of this lies in the future,
I will not discuss it here.
1£ I have conveyed the impression that my life at WBSI is full of new
directions, challenging new opportunities, and professional excitement, then
I have correctly described my present situation. As Helen and I turn from
looking at our Hewer-filled patio to the view of surf and coastline and moun-
tains to the north, we feel very pleased that we had the courage to embark
on this venture which has given us both a new zest for living.
CARL R. ROGERS 375

WHAT ARE THE MEANINGS IN MY CAREER?

What meanings, what significant threads, do I see in the events of my

professional life and thought? The drafting of this autobiography has made
me think seriously about this question for almost the first time, since I have
not ordinarily been one to look backward. Let me describe a number of the
meanings which I can distil out of my experience.

I have never really belonged to any professional group. I have been edu-
cated by, or had close working relationships with, psychologists, psycho-
analysts, psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers, social caseworkers, educa-
tors, and religious workers, yet I have never felt that I really belonged, in
any total or committed sense, to anyone of these groups. When psychology
was taking directions I did not like, I joined the social work profession.
When psychology became more interested in the human being, I returned
to psychology. When the AP A showed a rejecting attitude toward clinical
psychologists, I left it to become a very active member of a rebel group, the
American Association for Applied Psychology, splitting off from the main
stream of the profession. When more democratically-minded individuals be-
came concerned about the rigidities of the AP A, I worked hard to help bring
applied psychology back into the main stream. At the present time, most of
psychology seems to me so sterile that I have no feeling of attachment to it.
If some new profession were formed which more closely fitted my interests,
I would join it without so much as a backward glance at psychology.
Because of this attitude, I was deeply touched, to the point of tears,
when I was awarded one of the first three Scientific Contribution Awards
by the AP A. I was astonished that psychologists deeply and significantly re-
garded me as "one of them." In spite of all the work I had done in profes-
sional organizations of psychologists, in spite of working in departments of
psychology, I had never regarded myself in quite that way.
It should be obvious that whatever its disadvantages, this lack of be-
longing has left me free to deviate, to think independently, without any
sense of disloyalty to my group.
Lest one think I have been a complete nomad professionally, I should
add that the only groups to which I have ever really belonged have been
close-knit, congenial task forces which I have organized or helped organize,
or which have used my ideas as a part of their central core. Thus, for ex-
ample, I fully belonged to the Counseling Center of the University of
Chicago, and I belong deeply now to the \iV estern Behavioral Sciences
Institute. One may look upon this as evidence of egotism or whatever. I
simply mention it as a fact.
 376 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was fortunate in never having a mentor, and thus never had any pro-
fessional father-figure on whom I was dependent or against whom I had to
rebel. Many individuals, organizations, and writings were important to me
in my education, but no one source was paramount. There was no great
intellectual or emotional indebtedness to one person or one institution. This
too made it easy to think for myself, without any sense of guilt or betrayal.

I was similarly fortunate in having broken from my family and my

early religious beliefs, clearly and cleanly, with very little bitterness and
only a moderate amount of rebellion. Because the break came at the right
time, the differences could be open and above-board, not furtive and fester-
ing. This too helped me to feel comfortably self-reliant.

The types of isolation or "unrootedness" which I have been describing

have made for what I think of as a very positive kind of aloneness. A proverb
which has for many years meant a great deal to me is, "He travels fastest
who travels alone." I feel this has been a central theme for me. I have no
great desire to bring colleagues along with me. I am too impatient. I tend
to "go it alone," confident that if I am in error my efforts will be disregarded,
and equally confident that if I am doing something worthwhile, others will
at some point discover this.

I have never felt particularly insecure in regard to exams, degrees, posi-

tions, titles, promotions, tenure, and the like. I cannot account for this, for
I have often felt very insecure as to my abilities, my knowledge, the value of
my work or my writings. But I have never worried to any significant degree
as to whether I could pass an exam, fill a position, or win a promotion. This
is in spite of the fact that my first positions, held during the great depression,
were insecure. I have cared so little for permanent tenure that I have on
three separate occasions forfeited tenure in order to take a position I wanted.
I have always been inwardly quite certain that I could pass examina-
tions and that I could do whatever was required to hold a job. I have also
felt that in any position, I could build the job into exactly what I thought it
ought to be-and have been naively astonished on the few occasions when
superiors have thought otherwise. I have never felt that pleasing my su-
periors was a major goal. Sometimes they have understood what I was doing,
sometimes not. It has never been a matter of great importance to me.
If all of this sounds extraordinarily secure and self-sufficient, it is not.
I regard myself rather as having been exceedingly fortunate. I feel very
strongly that if I had been continually evaluated as our graduate students
are today, frequently failed in such examinations, scrutinized and super-
vised closely during my early professional years, put through the academic
ladder, I would probably have been destroyed as an original worker. I am
sensitive to any judgment which I think is a competent judgment, can read-
CARL R. ROGERS 377

ily be made to feel that I and my thoughts are worthless and inadequate,
and could very easily have been crushed by even the ordinary experiences
of academic and professional life in my earlier years. By the time I was
forty, I was beginning to have a confidence in myself which would not have
been easily beaten down but, before that, negative judgments from compe-
tent people would almost certainly have destroyed me.

As a corollary of not belonging firmly to any group, I have never felt

myself a part of the mainstream of psychology. Probably the major concern
of psychology during my lifetime has been in learning theory. I used to be
embarrassed by the fact that I found this field totally uninteresting. I felt
it was additional proof that I was not really a psychologist, when such highly
regarded work seemed to me to be mostly a pompous investigation of the
trivial. Now that some others also share this view, I dare to voice it.

I have had some sort of a penchant or gift for being in the forefront of
developments which were on the verge of occurring. I certainly take no credit
for this. It is nothing I have tried to do. It seems purely intuitive. Let me
explain what I mean with a number of examples.
I became interested in clinical psychology when it was a piddling and
insignificant appendage on the fringe of the respectable portions of psychol-
ogy. I could never have dreamed that in twenty-five years it would constitute
much the largest portion of the psychological profession.
I became interested in psychotherapy (the "treatment interview") when
it scarcely was a field of endeavor for anyone and when the one certain
thing about it was that it was solely the province of the physician. If some-
one had told me that in thirty-five years psychotherapy would be a major
interest of more than one-third of American psychologists, I would have re-
garded the statement as utterly absurd.
I thought that valuable raw data could be obtained by the electronic
recording of therapeutic interviews and made such recordings beginning in
1938 or 1939. At the time, every reputable therapist in the country was
certain that it was impossible to carryon any real therapy if either the thera-
pist or the client knew it was being recorded. I sometimes chuckle at the
fact that even the psychoanalysts-who were the most adamant-are now
involved in and advocating recording, and opening the sacrosanct analytic
hour to professional scrutiny and study.
I became interested in research in psychotherapy a couple of decades
before it became fashionable and respectable for psychologists and psychia-
trists to invest themselves in this field.
When I first began to realize that a theory of the self and the self-
concept might £it the emerging facts of my experience, I felt both lonely
and apologetic for emphasizing a line of thought which had died out with
introspectionism. I certainly did not foresee today's burgeoning of self-theory.
378 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was surprised to find, about 1951, that the directions of my thinking

and the central aspects of my therapeutic work could justifiably be labeled
existential and phenomenological. It seemed odd for an American psycholo-
gist to be in such strange company. Today these are significant influences on
our profession.
Perhaps these examples will make clear that in many instances the
directions in which I have felt impelled to move are directions which many
psychologists and psychiatrists have later followed. This has, to me, seemed
a strange thing.
On the basis of experiences such as these it is not surprising that I
believe that my current concern with the basic assumptions and philosophy
of the behavioral sicences, with the implications of the prediction and con-
trol of human behavior, with the potency of the intensive group experience
(the 'IT-group" or "basic encounter group"), with the development of a
humanistically oriented psychology, will also, within the next decade or two,
become central concerns of the whole field of psychology.

I enjoy discovering the order in large bodies of complex experience.

This has been a very persistent theme. It seems inevitable that I seek for
the meaning, the underlying order, and the lawfulness in every major area
of my interest. I tried to discover the underlying framework in the con-
glomeration of things clinicians did for children, and out of this came my
book on The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (1939). I have tried
to discover the orderly principles in the work of the therapist and in the
process of change in his client. I found it very satisfying to write a paper on
"The Process Equation of Psychotherapy" in which I tried to describe the
interaction in hard, parsimonious, and general terms. "A Tentative Formu-
lation of a General Law of Interpersonal Relationships" (ch. 18 in On Be-
coming a Person, 1961) is a still bolder attempt to sense the lawful pattern
which exists in a fantastically complex area of life. I am currently at work
trying to discern whatever order exists in the richly varied process of the
intensive group experience.
I have come to realize that both empirical research and the process of
theory construction are aimed, essentially, at the inward ordering of signifi-
cant experience. These activities are justified because it is subjectively satis-
fying to perceive the world as having order and because rewarding results
often ensue when one understands the lawful relationships which appear in
nature.

Another theme which stands out is the tension and division within me
between the sensitively subjective therapist and the hard-headed scientist.
I suspect I am not as sensitively attuned to human experience as some thera-
pists. I am sure that I am not as purely motivated by curiosity as the best
of the scientists. Yet, both this sensitively subjective understanding and this
CARL R. ROGERS 379
detached objective curiosity are very real aspects of my life. It is the working
out in me of the tensions between them which has been the basis for what-
ever contributions I have made to psychology. I have expressed this tension
most clearly perhaps in my paper "Persons or Science?" (1955). I thoroughly
enjoy the complete immersion in a highly subjective relationship which is
the heart of psychotherapy. I thoroughly enjoy the hard-headed precision of
the scientist and the elegance of any truly great research. If I try to give up
either one of these aspects of me, I am not complete. So some people, know-
ing me only as a "soft" therapist, are surprised to learn that I am also "tough."
A few, knowing me primarily from my research, are surprised that I can be
at times a delicate artist in the therapeutic relationship. I feel myself for-
tunate in having these two sharply different selves. I like both of them, and
they are both a real part of me.

I have often been a so-called "controversial person." This has meant

that I have been involved in a variety of professional struggles and battles.
I realize that my strategy has almost invariably been one of "island hopping."
In World War II, MacArthur-a great strategist but not otherwise one of
my heroes-never attacked the next island in the South Pacific, which was
always heavily fortified and defended. Instead he slipped a task force
through to some island far beyond, and captured and held that. Then the
island heavily defended by the Japanese simply died on the vine, without
ever having been attacked, simply because it could no longer be supplied or
supported. This very well describes my own intuitive strategy in professional
struggles. When psychiatrists have argued that psychotherapy is a medical
function and psychologists should not be allowed to practice it, I have spent
very little time arguing this directly but have simply gone far beyond it
trying to improve psychotherapy and to strengthen research in psychother-
apy. It has been my conviction that the argument would lose all its force if
psychologists were doing good therapy and expanding the area of knowledge
in that field through research. I feel this view has been borne out. When
the psychology department at Chicago had what I felt were unreasonably
constrictive rules for obtaining the Ph.D., I simply encouraged my students
to take their degrees through the Committee on Human Development. As
psychology lost students, it modified its rules in a more liberal direction. (In
the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, I was unsuccess-
ful in finding the island to which I might "hop," hence had to engage in a
more and more frontal attack on their-to me-antiquated and punitive
structure of graduate education, and hence was thoroughly defeated.) In
instance after instance in my professional life, I have felt it wasteful and
foolish to battle directly to achieve my goals. I much prefer to establish a
beach-head in the future, a beach-head which will make the current contro-
versy meaningless. Thus, for example, it has never been of any importance
to me to convince my professional colleagues that what I am doing is signifi-
 380 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

cant. This seems to me a most futile endeavor. But to interest students, who
will be the next generation of faculty members and practitioners, in what I
am doing-this has been of the greatest importance to me. I prefer, in other
words, to hop the present generation and concentrate on the coming one.

This relates very directly to the next theme of my life. I want to have
impact. I am not a person who is ambitious in the ordinary sense. It has
never made much difference to me whether I have prestige, position, or
power. In fact when power has been bestowed on me, I have usually given
it away to the group. But it is important to me to have influence. I want
what I do to count, to make a difference somewhere. I am not one of those
persons who can do his thinking and research in an isolated corner, with
never a care as to whether someone else finds it meaningful. I definitely
want my work to have an influence. This can be regarded as good or bad-
I suspect it is both-but it is most certainly a fact in me.

Very closely related is what I think of as my enjoyment of facilita-

tion. I get great pleasure out of facilitating the development of a person
in therapy, the development of growth-promoting interaction in a group,
or serving as a facilitative "change agent" in an institution. I realize that
my sense of "power" comes from the confidence I have that I can serve
as a catalyst and produce the unpredictable! This is truly exciting.
I think this is a rather rare trait. Most individuals who have attained
some status tend to dominate a situation-they are brilliant in conversation,
tend to be the center of attention in any group, simply cannot be ignored.
I, on the contrary, am absolutely at my worst if I am expected to be a
"leading figure," or an "exciting person." As my wife can testify, I simply
"clam up," and seem to be the dullest person around. If, however, I am
received as a person (by a group or an individual) and can sense an op-
portunity to facilitate change and growth (in myself as well as the other),
I can be a sparkling person whose expressiveness focuses attention not
particularly on myself but on each person's sensing of change within him-
self. I feel most deeply rewarded when the group or the individual leaves
me, not with the feeling, "what a brilliant leader (or speaker, or thinker)"
but with the feeling, "I feel myself changing-within myself and in my
relationship to my wife (or my children or my boss, Of my thinking and
professional interests.)" This ability to facilitate change, to free people for
change, is something I greatly prize in myself.

Another important aspect of my development is my liking for writ-

ing. As a shy boy, I found I could express myself much more freely in
writing than face to face. My love letters to Helen, as my wife-to-be, are
far more eloquent than anything I could express to her verbally. I enjoyed
writing stories and essays and poetry and even my attempts at scholarly
CARL R. ROGERS 381

papers in college. My work on the college debating team was helpful. The
course in homiletics I took at Union Seminary helped me to develop clarity.
But the experience which perhaps contributed most to my psychological
writing was the twelve years of preparing comprehensive reports on each
child we studied or dealt with at the Child Study Department and later
the Guidance Center in Rochester, New York. Frequently these reports
had to meet a deadline of a court hearing or an agency decision. If they
were to have any influence they had to be accurate, penetrating, compre-
hensive, persuasive in presenting the reasons for our recommendations,
clear and interesting enough to be read, and able to stand the test of time,
since we would continue to be in contact with both the agency and the
child, often for long periods. This was excellent training in writing and
strengthened both my desire and ability to write with clarity. I have re-
alized, as the years have gone by, that some writers desire to mystify. They
want (consciously or unconsciously) for the reader's reaction to be, "What
is this complex thing you're trying to say? I'll have to read it again." My
desire, on the other hand, has been, even from childhood, to be under-
stood. I would like to communicate so clearly that you cannot mistake my
meaning. This long-standing attitude has made a difference, and a fre-
quent comment on my writing, even from critics, is that it is lucid.

In more recent years I have assimilated another learning which has,

I believe, improved my writing, my speaking, and hence my impact. I
have expressed it as the knowledge that "what is most personal is most
general." I have come to realize that if I can drop some of my defenses,
can let myself come forth as a vulnerable person, can express some of the
attitudes which feel most personal, most private, most tentative and un-
certain in me, then the response from others is deep and receptive and
warming. If I can be deeply myself in my expression this sets up a reso-
nance in the other-whether an individual or an audience of 2000-which
is very rewarding both for the other and for me. I have gradually become
much more bold in revealing myself.

An important theme of my life is that I have had a personal exist-

ence and security quite apart from my professional life. If by some strange
circumstance I were completely barred from all psychological practice, re-
search, speaking, and writing, I would still have a full and rich life. I have
a security in my relationship with my wife which has been a rich resource
to me, and at times an even desperately needed one. Because of early diffi-
culties in sexual adjustment we were fortunate in learning that open com-
munication in problem areas, though difficult, is the only avenue to a better
relationship. So we have enjoyed each other and supplement each other
in many, many ways. She is naturally social where I tend to be a loner;
she dreams up trips and enterprises which I reluctantly accept and then
382 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

thoroughly enjoy; she has kept our life from being narrow. She has been
a true helpmate (a term which is unfortunately growing old-fashioned), in
every sense of the word.
In addition I have many fields of interest. I enjoy color photography,
especially close-ups; we both have enjoyed (through snorkeling) the under-
sea life of the Caribbean; I like to garden and nurse each plant and bud;
I like to make mobiles; I have an interest in art and have tried my hand
at painting; I enjoy carpentry; I have an interest in foreign cultures, espe-
cially primitive ones. All this has meant that my professional work is not
the be-all and end-all of my existence. Somehow I have an inwardly light
touch in regard to my work. It is not all there is to life. Sometimes I am
struck with the absurdity of my earnest effort to help a person, complete
a research, write a paper. Placed in the perspective of billions of years of
time. of millions of light-years of interstellar space, of the trillions of one-
celled organisms in the sea, of the life struggle by billions of people to
achieve their goals, I cannot help but wonder what possible significance
can be attached to the efforts of one person at one moment of time. I can
only do my part as one infinitely small living unit in this vast ongoing
universe. But such a perspective helps to keep me from feeling too self-
important.

There is one final thread in my career which has surely been woven
in and out through the years. It is that I have had a great deal of plain
luck, that chance and good fortune are elements which should be clearly
recognized in the shaping of my career. I do not wish to be unduly modest
or to say that the recognition I have received is all luck. But chance has
entered in, as two illustrations may indicate.
By chance, my book on The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child
came out at the very time (1939) that Ohio State University was making
every effort to establish a major position in clinical psychology. As a con-
sequence, I entered university life as a full professor, I became visible na-
tionally, instead of being involved in a local service agency, and a part
of that was pure luck.
When I wrote Counseling and Psychotherapy, in 1942, neither my
publisher nor I could have foreseen that the minuscule field of counseling
would suddenly expand at the end of the war into an enormous held of
great public interest. To have written one of the very few books on the
subject was to boost me again into national visibility, and again the timing
was simply lucky.

As I have been writing this section in which I have attempted to

discover the major themes of my professional life, I have been surprised
at a certain smugness or assurance which has crept in. At first I thought
this was quite unlike me and should be edited out. As I have thought it
CARL R. ROGERS 383

over further, I believe this is a real part of me and should be permitted

to remain in the manuscript. It was most certainly not present in my earlier
years, when I often felt a great lack of assurance, but it does describe a
part of me now. I do believe in what I am doing; I do trust my own ex-
perience more deeply than any authority; I am inwardly sure that the di-
rections in which I am moving are, and will prove to be, significant
directions. I do, in some very basic sense, believe in myself. Intellectually,
I know with equal assurance that I and my thinking may be shown to be
completely erroneous; that the directions in which I am moving may prove
to be blind alleys; but in spite of this openness of mind, I believe, at the
feeling level, in myself and in what I am doing. This degree of assurance
I do have.

REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Carl R. Rogers
This selection is intended to include what I regard as important expressions
of what were for me at the time, new directions in my thinking and work.
Measuring personality adjustment in children nine to thirteen. New York: Teach-
ers College, 1931. 107 pp.
The clinical treatment of the problem child. Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1939.
393 pp.
Counseling and psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942, 450 pp.
Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. Amer. Psychologist, 1946, 1, 415-
422.
Some observations on the organization of personality. Amer. Psychologist, 1947,
2, 358-368.
Client-centered therapy: its current practice, implications, and theory. Boston:
Houghton Miffiin, 1951. 560 pp.
(with Rosalind F. Dymond, Ed.) Psychotherapy and personality change. Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1954. 447 pp.
Persons or science? A philosophical question. Amer. Psychologist, 1955, 10, 267-
278.
The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. J. con-
sult. Psychol., 1957,21,95-103.
A process conception of psychotherapy. Amer. Psychologist, 1958, 13, 142-149.
A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in
the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: a study of a
science, Vol. III. Formulations of the person and the social context. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1959, 184-256.
The process equation of psychotherapy. Amer. J. Psychother., 1961, 15, No.1,
27-45.
On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifllin, 1961. 420 pp.
Learning to be free. In S. M. Farber and R. H. Wilson (Eds.), Conflict and cre-
ativity: control of the mind, Part 2. New York: McGraw-Hili, 1963, 268-288.
384 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Toward a science of the person. In T. W. Wann (Ed.), Behaviorism and phe-

nomenology: contrasting bases fOT modern psychology. Univ. of Chicago Press,
1964, 109-140.
Graduate education in psychology: a passionate statement. WBSI Reports. West-
ern Behavioral Sciences Institute, La Jolla, California, 1964.
The process of the basic encounter group. In J. Bugental (Ed.), The challenge
of humanistic psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, in press.
 Fabian Bachrach

385
B. F. Skinner
EARLY ENVIRONMENT

My Grandmother Skinner was an uneducated farmer's daughter who

put on airs. She was naturally attracted to a young Englishman who came
to America in the early 1870's looking for work, and she married him.
(He had not found just the work he wanted when he died at the age of
ninety.) l\1y grandmother's aspirations were passed on to her son, Wil-
liam, who "read law" while apprenticed as a draftsman in the Erie Railroad
shops in Susquehanna, a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. He
went on to a law school in New York City and passed his bar examination
in Susquehanna County before getting a degree. He suffered from his
mother's ambitions all his life. He was desperately hungry for praise, and
many people thought him conceited; but he secretly-and bitterly-consid-
ered himself a failure, even though he eventually wrote a standard text on
Workmen's Compensation Law which was in its fourth edition when he
died.
My mother, Grace Burrhus, was bright and beautiful. She had rigid
standards of what was "right," and they never changed. Her loyalties were
legendary. At eleven she began to correspond with a friend who had moved
away, and they wrote to each other in alternate weeks, without missing
a week, for seventy years. Her father was born in New York State. He
lied about his age to enlist as a drummer boy in the last year of the Civil
War. After the war he came to Susquehanna looking for work as a car-
penter, and eventually he became foreman of the Erie Carpenter Shops
there. My Grandmother Burrhus had the only claim to quality in the fam-
ily: an ancestor, a Captain Potter, had fought under Washington.
My home environment was warm and stable. I lived in the house I
was born in until I went to college. My father, mother, and I all graduated
from the same high school. I saw a great deal of my grandparents. I had
a brother two and a half years younger than 1. As a child I was fond of
1 Preparation of this manuscript has been supported by grant K6-MH-21, 775-01 of
the National Institute of Mental Health of the U. S. Public Health Service and by the
Human Ecology Fund.
387
388 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

him. I remember being ridiculed for calling him "honey," a term my mother
used for both of us at home. As he grew older he proved to be much bet-
ter at sports and more popular than I, and he teased me for my literary
and artistic interests. When he died suddenly of a cerebral aneurism at the
age of sixteen, I was not much moved. I probably felt guilty because I was not.
I had once made an arrowhead from the top of a tin can, and when I
made a test shot straight up into the air, the arrow fell back and struck
my brother in the shoulder, drawing blood. I recalled the event with a
shock many years later when I heard Lawrence Olivier speaking Hamlet's
lines:

.... Let my disclaiming from a purpos'd evil

Free me so far in your most generous thought,
That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
And hurt my brother.

Susquehanna is now half deserted, and it was even then a rather dirty
railroad town, but it is situated in a beautiful river valley. I roamed the
hills for miles around. I picked arbutus and dogwood in early Spring,
chewed sassafras root and wintergreen berries and the underbark of slip-
pery elm, killed rattlesnakes, and found £lint arrowheads. With another boy
I built a shack in the hills alongside a creek, and I learned to swim in the
pool we made by blocking the creek with a sod-and-stone dam, sharing
the pool with a poisonous watersnake. Four other boys and I once went
three hundred miles down the Susquehanna River in a Heet of three canoes.
I was fifteen at the time and the oldest in the party.
I was always building things. I built roller-skate scooters, steerable
wagons, sleds, and rafts to be poled about on shallow ponds. I made see-
saws, merry-go-rounds, and slides. I made slingshots, bows and arrows,
blow guns and water pistols from lengths of bamboo, and from a discarded
water boiler a steam cannon with which I could shoot plugs of potato and
carrot over the houses of our neighbors. I made tops, diabolos, model air-
planes driven by twisted rubber bands, box kites, and tin propellers which
could be sent high into the air with a spool-and-string spinner. I tried again
and again to make a glider in which I myself might Hy.
I invented things, some of them in the spirit of the outrageous con-
traptions in the cartoons which Rube Goldberg was publishing in the
Philadelphia Inquirer (to which, as a good Republican, my father sub-
scribed). For example, a friend and I used to gather elderberries and sell
them from door to door, and I built a Hotation system which separated ripe
from green berries. I worked for years on the design of a perpetual motion
machine. (It did not work.)
I went through all twelve grades of school in a single building, and
there were only eight students in my class when I graduated. I liked school.
It was the custom for students to congregate outside the building until a
B. F. SKINNER 389

bell rang and the doors were opened. I was a constant problem for the
janitor, because I would arrive early and ask to be let in. He had been
told to keep me out, but he would shrug, open the door just enough to
let me through, and lock it after me. As I see it now, the school was good.
I had four strong years of high school mathematics using no-nonsense texts
by Wentworth. In my senior year I could read a bit of Virgil well enough
to feel that I was getting the meaning in Latin. Science was weak, but I
was always doing physical and chemical experiments at home.
My father was a sucker for book salesmen ("We are contacting a few
of the town's more substantial citizens"), and as a result we had a fairly
large library consisting mostly of sets-The World's Great Literature, l\1as-
terpieces of World History, Gems of Humor, and so on. Half a dozen small
volumes on applied psychology, published by an "institute," were beauti-
fully bound, with white spines and embossed seals on blue covers. I re-
member only one sample: it was said that an advertisement for chocolates
showing a man shovelling cocoa beans into a large roasting oven was bad
psychology.
An old-maid school teacher named Mary Graves was an important fig-
ure in my life. Her father was the village atheist and an amateur botanist
who believed in evolution. Miss Graves once showed me a letter he had
received from the Prince of Monaco offering to exchange specimens of
pressed plants. Miss Graves was a dedicated person with cultural interests
far beyond the level of the town. She organized the Monday Club, a lit-
erary society to which my mother belonged. The club would spend a winter
reading Ibsen's Doll's House. Miss Graves did her best to bring the little
town library up to date. When I was in high school, she once whispered
to me in a conspiratorial tone, "I have just been reading the strangest book.
It is called Lord Jim."
Miss Graves was my teacher in many fields for many years. She taught
a Presbyterian Sunday school class, taking six or eight of us boys through
most of the Old Testament. She taught me drawing in the lower grades,
and she was later promoted to teaching English, both reading and compo-
sition. I think it was in the eighth grade that we were reading As You
Like It. One evening my father happened to say that some people believed
that the plays were not written by Shakespeare but by a man named Bacon.
The next day I announced to the class that Shakespeare had not actually
written the play we were reading. "You don't know what you are talking
about," said Miss Graves. That afternoon I went down to the public library
and drew out Edwin Durning-Lawrence's Bacon is Shakespeare (1910). The
next day I did know what I was talking about, and I must have made life
miserable for Miss Graves for the next month or two. Durning-Lawrence
had analyzed act live, scene one of Love's Labours Lost) proving that the word
honori~cabilitudinitatibus was a cipher which, when properly interpreted,
read, "These works, the offspring of Francis Bacon, are preserved for the
390 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

world." To my amazement I discovered that the same act and scene in As

Yau Like It was also cryptic. The philosopher Touchstone (who else but
Bacon?) is disputing with the simple William (who else but Shakespeare?)
for the possession of the fair Audrey (what else but the authorship of the
plays?). The clincher was that William says that he was born in the Forest
of Arden, and Shakespeare's mother's name was Arden. (0, the lovely
adolescent obscenity of that "forest"!) I have long since lost interest in the
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, but in my defensive zeal I read biographies
of Bacon, summaries of his philosophical position, and a good deal of The
Advancement of Learning and N ovum Organum. How much it meant to
me at the age of fourteen or fifteen I cannot say, but Francis Bacon will
turn up again in this story.
Miss Graves was probably responsible for the fact that in college I
majored in English literature and afterwards embarked upon a career as a
writer, and probably also for the fact that I have dabbled in art. I have
never painted or sculpted really well, but I have enjoyed trying to do so.
My father had played the trumpet (then called the cornet) in a small
orchestra, but he gave it up when he married. I never heard him play more
than a few notes; he had "lost his lip." My mother played the piano well
and had an excellent contralto voice. She sang at weddings and funerals-
and the same songs at both. I still have her copy of J. C. Bartlett's "A
Dream." It begins, "Last night I was dreaming of thee, love, was dream-
ing ... " A sacred text for use at funerals is added in her own hand:
"Corne, Jesus, Redeemer, abide thou with me-e ... " At the age of eight or
nine I studied the piano for a year with an old man who sucked Sens-sens
and jabbed me in the ribs with a sharp pencil whenever I made a mistake.
For a while I gave up the piano in favor of the saxophone. My father was
then local attorney for the Erie Railroad, and he arranged for me to play
with an employee's band. We never got beyond "Poet and Peasant," "Morn-
ing Noon and Night in Vienna," and other overtures by von Suppe, but
I learned to love ensemble playing. I played in a jazz band during my high
school years. When I returned to the piano again, a friend of the family
who taught piano noticed that I was limited to my mother's sentimental
music and a few volumes of Piano Pieces the Whole World Loves, and she
sent me a copy of Mozart's Fourth Sonata. Shortly afterward I bought all
the Mozart sonatas, playing at first only short passages here and there. Later
I carne to play them all through once a year in a kind of ritual.
I was never physically punished by my father and only once by my
mother. She washed my mouth out with soap and water because I had
used a bad word. My father never missed an opportunity, however, to in-
form me of the punishments which were waiting if I turned out to have
a criminal mind. He once took me through the county jail, and on a sum-
mer vacation I was taken to a lecture with colored slides describing life
B. F. SKINNER 391

in Sing Sing. As a result I am afraid of the police and buy too many tickets
to their annual dances.
My mother was quick to take alarm if I showed any deviation from
what was "right." Her technique of control was to say "tut-tut" and to ask,
"What will people think?" I can easily recall the consternation in my fam-
ily when in second grade I brought home a report card on which, under
"Deportment," the phrase HAnnays others" had been checked. Many things
which were not "right" still haunt me. I was allowed to play in the ceme-
tery next door, but it was not "right" to step on a grave. Recently in a
cathedral I found myself executing a series of smart right-angle detours to
avoid the engraved stones on the floor. I was taught to "respect books,"
and it is only with a twinge that I can today crack the spine of a book to
make it stay open on the piano.
My Grandmother Skinner made sure that I understood the concept of
hell by showing me the glowing bed of coals in the parlor stove. In a
travelling magician's show I saw a devil complete with horns and barbed
tail, and I lay awake all that night in an agony of fear. Miss Graves, though
a devout Christian, was liberal. She explained, for example, that one might
interpret the miracles in the Bible as figures of speech. Shortly after I
reached puberty, I had a mystical experience. I lost a watch which I had
just been given by my family, and I was afraid to go home ("You would
lose your head if it were not screwed on"). I took my bicycle and rode up
along the river and followed the creek up to our shack. I was miserably
unhappy. Suddenly it occurred to me that happiness and unhappiness must
cancel out and that if I were unhappy now I would necessarily be happy
later. I was tremendously relieved. The principle came with the force of
a revelation. In a mood of intense exaltation I started down along the
creek. Halfway to the road, in a nest of dried grass beside the path, lay
my watch. I have no explanation; I had certainly "lost" it in town. I took
this as a Sign. I hurried home and wrote an account in biblical language
and purple ink. (The ink I had made by dissolving the lead from an in-
delible pencil, and it had an appropriate golden sheen.) No other signs fol-
lowed, however, and my new testament remained only one chapter in
length. Within a year I had gone to Miss Graves to tell her that I no longer
believed in God. "I know," she said, "I have been through that myself."
But her strategy misfired: I never went through it.

COLLEGE
A friend of the family recommended Hamilton College, and I did not
think of going anywhere else. It was then at the nadir of its long career.
I took an absurd program of courses, but in some curious way I have made
392 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

good use of everyone of them. I majored in English and had good courses
in Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer (for which I wrote a modern translation of liThe
Pardoner's Tale"), Shakespeare, Restoration drama, and Romantic poetry.
I minored in Romance languages. Hamilton was proud of its reputation for
public speaking, and I had four thin compulsory years of that. I elected
biology as my freshman science and went on to advanced courses in embry-
ology and cat anatomy.
The most important thing that happened to me at Hamilton was get-
ting to know the Saunders family. They were abroad during my freshman
year, recovering from the tragic death of their elder son, a brilliant student
who had been killed in a hazing accident the year before. All the Saunders
children were prepared for college at home; and when the family returned,
they asked my mathematics professor to suggest a tutor for their younger
son. I agreed to serve.
Percy Saunders was then dean. Hamilton College students called him
"Stink" because he taught chemistry, but his great love was hybrid peonies.
He and his family lived in a large frame house alongside the campus. It
was full of books, pictures, sculpture, musical instruments, and huge bou-
quets of peonies in season. Dean Saunders played the violin, and there
were string quartets at least one night a week. Louise Saunders took in a
few students each year to prepare them for college, among them usually a
pretty girl with whom I would fall in love. We would walk through the
Root Woods, returning for tea before a fire in the music room in the late
afternoon. Once in a while on a clear night a telescope would be set up
among the peonies, and we would look for the moons of Mars or Saturn's
rings. Interesting people came to stay-writers, musicians, and artists. Be-
side my chair as I listened to Schubert or Beethoven I might find a copy of
the avant-garde Broom or a letter from Ezra Pound. I remember a page
from the score of George Antheil's Ballet Mecanique with the words
COMPLETELY PERCUSSIVE printed diagonally across it. Percy and
Louise Saunders made an art of living, something I had not known was
possible.
I never fitted into student life at Hamilton. I joined a fraternity with-
out knowing what it was all about. I was not good at sports and suffered
acutely as my shins were cracked in ice hockey or better players bounced
basketballs off my cranium-all in the name of what was ironically called
"physical education." In a paper I wrote at the end of my freshman year,
I complained that the college was pushing me around with unnecessary
requirements (one of them daily chapel) and that almost no intellectual
interest was shown by most of the students. By my senior year I was in
open revolt.
John K. Hutchens and I began that year with a hoax. Our professor
of English composition, Paul Fancher, was a great name-dropper in the
field of the theater. Hutchens and I had posters printed reading, in part:
B. F. SKINNER 393

"Charles Chaplin, the famous cinema comedian, will deliver his lecture
'Moving Pictures as a Career' in the Hamilton College Chapel on Friday,
October 9." The lecture was said to be under Fancher's auspices. In the
early hours of October 9 we went down to the village, plastered the posters
on store windows and telephone poles, threw a few into lobbies of apart-
ment houses, and wenl back to bed. That morning Hutchens called the
afternoon paper in Utica, the nearest city, and told them that the president
had announced the lecture at morning chapel. By noon the thing was com-
pletely out of hand. The paper ran Chaplin's picture on the front page and
even guessed at the time he would arrive at Union Station, which, I am
ashamed to say, was swarming with children at the appointed hour. In
spite of police road-blocks it was estimated that 400 cars got through to the
campus. A football pep meeting was mistaken for a Chaplin rally, and a
great throng began to mill around the gymnasium. The editorial which
appeared next day in the college paper ("No man with the slightest re-
gard for his alma mater would have done it") was one of the best things
Hutchens ever wrote.
As a nihilistic gesture, the hoax was only the beginning. Through the
student publications we began to attack the faculty and various local sacred
cows. I published a parody of the bumbling manner in which the professor
of public speaking would review student performances at the end of a
class. I wrote an editorial attacking Phi Beta Kappa. At commencement
time I was in charge of Class Day exercises, which were held in the gym-
nasium, and with the help of another student (Alf Evers, later a well known
illustrator) I covered the walls with bitter caricatures of the faculty.
One of the most sacred of Hamilton institutions was the Clark Prize
Oration. Students submitted written orations, six of which were selected
to be spoken in an evening contest, from which a winner was chosen by
a committee of judges. Four of us decided to wreck the institution. We
submitted orations which we thought would be selected but which were
potentially so bombastic that we could convert the evening into an up-
roarious farce. We misjudged the judges, however. Only mine was selected.
I found myself on the program with £ve serious speakers. I decided there
was nothing for it but to go through with the joke alone, hoping that my
friends would understand. Very few did. We also made a shambles of the
commencement ceremonies, and at intermission the President warned us
sternly that we would not get our degrees if we did not settle down.

LITERARY INTERLUDE

My Hamilton College activities seemed to be pointing toward a career

as a writer. As a child I had had an old typewriter and a small printing
press, and during my grade school years I wrote poems and stories and
394 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

typed or printed them "artistically." I started a novel or two-sentimental

stuff on the model of James Oliver Curwood: Pierre, an old trapper, lived
in the woods of colonial Pennsylvania with his lovely daughter, Marie
(how they got down from Quebec I never thought it necessary to explain).
In high school I worked for the local Transcript. In the morning before
school I would crib national and international news from the Binghamton
papers which had come in on the morning train. Occasionally I did a fea-
ture story or published a poem in the manner of Edgar Guest. When I got
to college I contributed serious poems to the Hamilton Literary Magazine.
Free verse was coming in, and I tried my hand at it. Here is a sample:
CONCUPISCENCE
An old man, sowing in a field,
Walks with a slow, uneasy rhythm.
He tears handfuls of seed from his vitals,
Caressing the wind wi th the sweep of this hand.
At night he stops, breathless,
Murmuring to his earthy consort,
"Love exhausts me!"

And I had not yet heard of Freud. Once, when in love, I wrote five or six
rather derivative Shakespearean sonnets and enjoyed the strange excite-
ment of emitting whole lines ready-made, properly scanned and rhymed.
The summer before my senior year I attended the Middlebury School
of English at Breadloaf, Vermont. I took a course with Sidney Cox, who
one day invited me to have lunch with Robert Frost. Frost asked me to send
him some of my work, and I sent him three short stories. His comments
came the following April. The letter is printed in the Selected Letters of
Robert Frost, edited by Lawrance Thompson (1964). It was encouraging,
and on the strength of it I definitely decided that I would be a writer. My
father had always hoped that I would study law and come into his office.
My birth had been announced in the local paper in that vein: "The town
has a new law firm: Wm. A. Skinner & Son." I had taken a course in politi-
cal science my senior year just in case I might indeed go into law. My
father was naturally unhappy that I had decided against it. He thought I
should prepare myself to earn a living-say, as a lawyer-and then try my
hand at writing. He eventually agreed, however, that I should live at home
(in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to which my family had moved) and write
for a year or two. I built a small study in the attic and set to work. The
results were disastrous. I frittered away my time. I read aimlessly, built
model ships, played the piano, listened to the newly-invented radio, con-
tributed to the humorous column of a local paper but wrote almost noth-
ing else, and thought about seeing a psychiatrist.
Before the year was out, I rescued myself and my self-respect by tak-
ing on a hack job. The FBI has occasionally expressed interest in that two-
B. F. SKINNER 395

year gap in my educational history, but I was not wntmg for the Daily
Worker. On the contrary, I was way out on the right wing. In 1904, after
a bitter coal strike, President Theodore Roosevelt had set up a Board of
Conciliation to settle grievances brought by unions and companies. The de-
cisions which had since been handed down were increasingly cited as prece-
dents, and the coal companies wanted them digested so that their lawyers
could prepare cases more effectively. I read and abstracted thousands of
decisions and classified them for ready reference. My book was privately
printed under the title A Digest of Decisions of the Anthracite Board of
Conciliation. (My father was listed as coauthor, but for prestige only.) The
book was intended to give the coal companies an advantage, but the lawyer
who prepared all the union cases had a copy within the year.
After I had finished the book, I went to New York for six months of
bohemian living in Greenwich Village, then to Europe for the summer,
and on to Harvard in the fall to begin the study of psychology. In New York
I worked in a book shop, dined at Chumleys', and drank hot rum Punchino's
at Jimmy's, a speakeasy on Barrow Street. My friends were liberal and even
intellectual. On Saturday nights eight or ten of us would somehow manage
to have an all-night party on one quart of prohibition gin. That summer
Paris was full of literary ex-patriots and I met some of them, but a violent
reaction against all things literary was setting in.
I had failed as a writer because I had had nothing important to say,
but I could not accept that explanation. It was literature which must be at
fault. A girl I had played tennis with in high school-a devout Catholic who
later became a nun-had once quoted Chesterton's remark about a char-
acter of Thackeray's: "Thackeray didn't know it but she drank." I general-
ized the principle to all literature. A writer might portray human behavior
accurately, but he did not therefore understand it. I was to remain inter-
ested in human behavior, but the literary method had failed me; I would
turn to the scientific. Alf Evers, the artist, had eased the transition. "Science,"
he once told me, "is the art of the twentieth century." The relevant science
appeared to be psychology, though I had only the vaguest idea of what that
meant.

TOWARD PSYCHOLOGY

Many odds and ends contributed to my decision. I had long been in-
terested in animal behavior. We had no household pets, but I caught and
kept turtles, snakes, toads, lizards, and chipmunks. I read Thornton Burgess
and Ernest Thompson Seton and was interested in folk wisdom about ani-
mals. The man who kept the livery stable once explained that the cowboys
in the rodeo let themselves be thrown just before "breaking the spirit" of
the bucking broncos to avoid spoiling them for future performances. At
396 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

a county fair I saw a troupe of performing pigeons. The scene was the
facade of a building. Smoke appeared from the roof, and a presumably fe-
male pigeon poked her head out of an upper window. A team of pigeons
came on stage pulling a fire engine, smoke pouring from its boiler. Other
pigeons with red fire hats rode on the engine, one of them pulling a string
which rang a bell. Somehow a ladder was put up against the building, and
one of the firepigeons climbed it and came back down followed by the
pigeon from the upper window.
Human behavior also interested me. A man in Binghamton who gave
me advanced lessons on the saxophone had entertained soldiers during the
war with a vaudeville act. He wrote the alphabet forward with his right
hand and backward with his left while adding a column of figures and an-
swering questions-all at the same time. It gave him a headache. I remem-
ber being puzzled by an episode at some kind of church fair where there
was a booth in which you could throw baseballs at dolls mounted on a rack.
The dolls were restored to their place by pulling a rope from the front of
the booth. When the woman who ran the concession was gathering balls
near the dolls, some wag pulled the rope. Everyone laughed as the woman
dropped to the ground in alarm. Why had she confused the sound of the
rack with the sound of a ball?
Some of the things I built had a bearing on human behavior. I was
not allowed to smoke, so I made a gadget incorporating an atomizer bulb
with which I could "smoke" cigarettes and blow smoke rings hygienically.
(There might be a demand for it today.) At one time my mother started a
campaign to teach me to hang up my pajamas. Every morning while I was
eating breakfast, she would go up to my room, discover that my pajamas were
not hung up, and call to me to come up immediately. She continued this
for weeks. When the aversive stimulation grew unbearable, I constructed
a mechanical device that solved my problem. A special hook in the closet
of my room was connected by a string-and-pulley system to a sign hanging
above the door to the room. When my pajamas were in place on the hook,
the sign was held high above the door out of the way. When the pajamas
were off the hook, the sign hung squarely in the middle of the door frame.
It read: "Hang up your pajamas!"
My earliest interest in psychology was philosophical. In high school
I began a treatise entitled "Nova Principia Orbis Terrarum." (That sounds
pretentious, but at least I got it out of my system early. Clark Hull published
his Principia at the age of fifty-nine.) Two pages of this great work survive.
It begins: "Our soul consists of our mind, our power of reasoning, thinking,
imagining, weighing, our power to receive impressions, and stimulate ac-
tion of our body; and our conscience, our inner knowledge of write (sic)."
I engaged in a good deal of self-observation, and I kept notes. Once in a
rather noisy street I was trying to talk to a friend in a store window. Though
I strained to hear him, I could not make out what he was saying. Then I
B. F. SKINNER 397

discovered that there was no glass in the window and that his voice was
reaching me loud and clear. I had dismissed it as part of the ambient noise
and was listening for a fainter signal.
College did little to further my interest in psychology. The only formal
instruction I received lasted ten minutes. Our professor of philosophy (who
had actually studied under Wundt) once drew a pair of dividers from his
desk drawer (the first Brass Instrument I had ever seen) and demonstrated
the two-point limen. My term paper for a course in Shakespeare was a study
of Hamlet's madness. I read rather extensively on schizophrenia, but I should
not care to have the paper published today. At Breadloaf I wrote a one-act
play about a quack who changed people's personalities with endocrines, a
subject which was then beginning to attract attention in the newspapers.
After college my literary interests carried me steadily toward psychol-
ogy. Proust's A La Recherche du temps perdu was just being translated. I
read all that was available in English and then carried on in French. (I
bought Part VIII, Le Temps retrouve, in Algiers in 1928. The uncut pages
indicate that I abandoned literature on page ninety-six.) Proust intensified
my habit of self-observation and of noting and recording many tricks of
perception and memory. Before going to Harvard I bought Parson's book
on perception, and I suppose it was only my extraordinary luck which kept
me from becoming a Gestalt or (so help me) a cognitive psychologist.
The competing theme which saved me was suggested by "Bugsy" Mor-
rell, my biology teacher at Hamilton. He had called my attention to Jacques
Loeb's Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology (1900), and
later he showed me Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes (1927). I bought Pavlov's
book and read it while living in Greenwich Village. The literary magazine
called The Dial, to which I subscribed, was publishing articles by Bertrand
Russell, and they led me to Russell's book, Philosophy, published in 1925,
in which he devoted a good deal of time to John B. Watson's Behaviorism,
emphasizing its epistemological implications. I got hold of Watson's Be-
haviorism (1924-25) (but not his Psychology from the Standpoint of a
Behaviorist, 1919), and in the bookstore in New York I read the store's copy
of his Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928) between customers.
The Department of Psychology at Harvard did not strengthen any
particular part of this hodgepodge of interests, but two graduate students
did. Fred S. Keller, who was teaching part time at Tufts, was a sophisticated
behaviorist in every sense of the word. I had seen the regal name of Charles
K. Trueblood spread across the pages of The Dial, for which he wrote many
reviews. Now I found Trueblood himself, in white coat and gumshoes,
moving silently through the corridors of Emerson Hall carrying cages of
rats, the performances of which he was studying in a rotated maze. I wel-
comed the support of another renegade from literature.
At Harvard I entered upon the first strict regimen of my life. I had
done what was expected of me in high school and college but had seldom
398 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

worked hard. Aware that I was far behind in a new field, I now set up a
rigorous schedule and maintained it for almost two years. I would rise at
six, study until breakfast, go to classes, laboratories, and libraries with no
more than fifteen minutes unscheduled during the day, study until exactly
nine o'clock at night and go to bed. I saw no movies or plays, seldom went
to concerts, had scarcely any dates, and read nothing but psychology and
physiology.
My program in the department was not heavy. Boring was on leave,
writing his history. Troland gave a course, but I found it unbearably dull
and withdrew after the first day. Carroll Pratt taught psychophysical meth-
ods and was always available for discussions. I took Harry Murray's course
in Abnormal Psychology the first year he gave it. I could reach French but
needed German as well, so I took an intensive course which met five
days a week. To pass statistics I simply read G. Udney Yule's An Introduc-
tion to the Theory of Statistics (1911). His use of Greek letters to refer to
the absence of attributes explains my symbols SD and S~, the awkwardness
of which has plagued many psychologists since.
The intellectual life around the department was of a high order. A
weekly colloquium, loosely structured, was always exciting and challenging.
We argued with Pratt, Beebe-Center, and Murray on even terms. The in-
formality is shown by a letter which I wrote to Harry Murray, of which
he recently reminded me. He had given a colloquium on his theory of
"regnancy." I wrote to tell him that there were some things about himself
I felt he ought to know. When he was a child, he had obviously been led
to believe that it was urine which entered the female in sexual intercourse.
This had wreaked havoc in his scientific thinking, and he was still trying
to separate p from pregnancy.
A joint reception for new students in philosophy and psychology was
held each year at Professor Hocking's. My first year I turned up at the
appointed hour, which was, of course, too early. A little old man with a
shiny bald head and deep-set eyes soon arrived and came straight toward
me in the friendliest way. He wore a wing collar and ascot tie. He stam-
mered slightly and spoke with an English accent. I sized him up as a clergy-
man-perhaps an imported preacher in one of the better Boston churches.
He asked me where I had gone to college and what philosophy I had studied.
He had never heard the name of my professor and was only puzzled when
I tried to help by explaining that he was an Edwardian (meaning a disciple
of Jonathan Edwards). He told me that a young psychologist should keep
an eye on philosophy, and I told him, fresh from my contact with Bertrand
Russell, that it was quite the other way around: we needed a psychological
epistemology. This went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, as the room filled
up. Others began to speak to my new friend. Finally a student edged in
beside me, explaining that he wanted to get as close to the professor as
possible. "Professor who?" I asked. "Professor Whitehead," he said.
B. F. SKINNER 399

My thesis had only the vaguest of Harvard connections. Through a

friend who had come to Harvard to study under Percy Bridgman I got to
know the Logic of Modern Physics (1927). I read Poincare and Mach. I
began to spend a good deal of time in the Boston Medical Library and in
the summer of 1930 wrote a paper on the concept of the reflex, adopting
the semihistorical method from Mach's Science of Mechanics. Early that
fall I was discussing my future with Beebe-Center. I outlined the work I
intended to cover in my thesis. His comment was typical: "Who do you
think you are? Helmholtz?" He encouraged me to get a thesis in at once.
I was already well along in my work on changes in rate of eating and had
written two short papers on drive and reflex strength. I combined these
with my paper on the reflex and submitted them as a thesis to Professor
Boring, who was now back in residence. I still have his long reply. He was
bothered by my selective use of history. A thesis on the history of the reflex
should be quite different. He suggested an alternative outline. I felt that he
had missed my point, and I resubmitted the thesis without change. Suspect-
ing that he was bothered by my behavioristic leanings, I attached a quota-
tion from Thomas Hood:

Owning her weakness,

Her evil behavior,
And leaving, with meekness,
Her sins to her Savior.

Boring accepted the role of Savior. He appointed a thesis committee of

which he himself was not a member; the thesis was approved, and I passed
my orals at the end of the fall term of 1930-31. I stayed in my laboratory,
supported by the balance of a Harvard Fellowship, until June.
Meanwhile I had come into close contact with W. J. Crozier and
Hudson Hoagland. Hoagland had taken his Ph.D. in psychology but was
teaching in Crozier's department of General Physiology. It was felt, I think,
that Crozier was stealing students from psychology. He certainly offered
enthusiastic encouragement, and after I got my degree he put me up for
National Research Council Fellowships for two years, but I was never under
any pressure to adopt his principles or move into his field. During my first
postdoctoral year I spent every other day working on the central nervous
system at the medical school under Alexander Forbes and Hallowell Davis.
For the rest of my time Crozier offered me a subterranean laboratory in the
new biology building. I moved my animal equipment into it and worked
there for live years, the last three as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society
of Fellows.
I have traced the development of my research in detail elsewhere
(see 1956). Russell and Watson had given me no glimpse of experimental
method, but Pavlov had: control the environment and you will see order
in behavior. In a course with Hoagland I discovered Sherrington and
400 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Magnus. I read Korperstellung and proposed to do a translation (fortunately

I failed to find a publisher). I felt that my thesis had exorcised the physio-
logical ghosts from Sherrington's synapse, and I could therefore maintain
contact with these earlier workers. In writing The Behavior of Organisms
(1938) I held doggedly to the term "reflex." Certain characteristics of
operant behavior were, however, becoming clear. My first papers were chal-
lenged by two Polish physiologists, Konorski and Miller. It was in my an-
swer to them that I first used the word "operant." Its function, then as now,
was to identify behavior traceable to reinforcing contingencies rather than
to eliciting stimuli.

MINNESOTA

In the spring of 1936, the low point of the depression, the end of my
Junior Fellowship was approaching and I had no job. The best offer the
Department of Psychology could pass along to me was from a YMCA col-
lege; but Walter Hunter was teaching that summer at Minnesota, and he
mentioned me to R. M. Elliott, who was looking for someone to teach small
sections of a big introductory course. The beginning salary was $1900.
At Minnesota I not only taught for the first time, I began to learn col-
lege psychology, keeping a jump or two ahead of my students in Wood-
worth's text. I chose two sections of twenty students each from about eight
hundred in the beginning course. Many of them were already committed
to particular careers, such as medicine, law, journalism, and engineering, but
five percent of the students I had during five years went on to get Ph.D.'s
in psychology and many more to get M.A.'s. I stole W. K. Estes from en-
gineering and Norman Guttman from philosophy. I have never again been
so richly reinforced as a teacher.

VERBAL BEHAVIOR

I did not quite give up literature. At Harvard I met I. A. Richards,

who managed somehow to blend psychology and literary criticism, and I
discussed books and techniques with other literary friends. I wrote an article
for the Atlantic Monthly under the editor's title of "Has Gertrude Stein a
Secret?" In it I showed that a paper which Gertrude Stein had published
when at Radcliffe contained samples of her own automatic writing which
resembled material she later published as literature. Gertrude Stein wrote
to the editor in reply: "No, it is not so automatic as he thinks. If there is
anything secret it is the other way too. I think I achieve by xtra conscious-
ness, xcess, but then what is the use of telling him that, he being a psychol-
ogist and I having been one."
B. F. SKINNER 401

I began to look at literature, not as a medium for portraying human

behavior, but as a field of behavior to be analyzed. A discussion with White-
head after dinner at the Society of Fellows set me to work on my book
Verbal Behavior (1957). The chairman of the Society, L. J. Henderson,
cautioned me that such a book might take five years. The following summer
he sent a postcard from France: "A motto for your book-lear le mot, r;'est
le verhe, et le vetbe, c'est Dieu'-Victor Hugo."
As a boy I knew two interesting cases of verbal behavior. My Grand-
mother Skinner was an almost pathological talker. My grandfather had
stopped listening to her while still a young man, and when any visitor came
to her house she would begin talking and would repeat, without pausing,
a string of anecdotes and stereotyped comments which we all knew by heart.
More predictable verbal behavior I have never seen. The other case was
Professor Bowles, the principal of my high school, who taught mathematics.
He had a long list of favorite topics, and almost any stimulus would set
him off an a digression. He would eventually return to mathematics with
a perfunctory bow to the comment which had first set him olE One day
I made running notes of the topics he was touching upon. There were two
long harangues that day, and to my surprise he concluded the second by
returning to the topic with which he had begun and concluded the first!
When I was in the Society of Fellows, another verbal phenomenon
came to my attention. On a beautiful Sunday morning I was in my sub-
terranean, soundproofed laboratory writing notes against a background of
rhythmic noise from my apparatus. Suddenly I found myself joining in the
rhythm, saying silently, "You'll never get out, you'll never get out, you'll
never get out." The relevance of the remark seemed worth investigating. I
built a phonographic system in which patterns of vowels (separated by
glottal stops) could be repeated as often as desired. Playing each sample
softly to a subject, I could maintain the illusion that it was actual speech
and could collect a large sample of "projective" verbal responses. Harry
Murray supplied me with subjects from his research on thematic apper-
ception.
My renewed interest in literature was encouraged by my marriage in
1936 to Yvonne Blue. She had majored in English at the University of
Chicago, where she had taken a course in English composition with Thorn-
ton Wilder. She is an active reader (and a rapid one-she reads exactly
twice as fast as I), and there were always new books around the house.
When I had a chance to give a summer school course in the psychology of
literature, she attended my lectures and reinforced me appropriately. I gave
the course again and broadcast it over an educational radio station. To fill
out the term I roamed rather widely, from The Meaning of Meaning (1945)
through psychoanalysis, and thus explored the field of verbal behavior rather
more widely than I should otherwise have done. As a rule the material in
which I had least confidence proved to be most popular, but I did not
402 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wholly abandon my scientific principles. After several persuasive demon-

strations of alliteration as a verbal process, for example, I became suspicious
and made a statistical analysis of a hundred of Shakespeare's sonnets. I found
that, although an occasional line might have as many as four stressed ini-
tial s's, such lines occurred almost exactly as often as one would predict
from chance. CA similar study of Swinburne, I was glad to find, not only
demonstrated alliteration, but showed an alliterative tendency extending
over several syllables.)
In the fall of 1941 on a Guggenheim Fellowship I began to write a
final draft of Verbal Behavior. The war intervened, but I picked up the
Fellowship again in 1944-45 and finished the greater part of the manu-
script. I gave a course from it in the summer of 1947 at Columbia, and my
William James Lectures at Harvard that fall were based on it. I put off a
final version in order to write Science and Human Behavior (1953). Verbal
Behavior was published, not five, as Henderson had predicted, but twenty-
three years after it was begun, in 1957. It was completed under heavy com-
petition from research and from another book, Schedules of Reinforcement
(1957), which Charles Ferster and I published at about the same time.

PROJECT PIGEON

By the end of the 1930's the Nazis had demonstrated the power of the
airplane as an offensive weapon. On a train from Minneapolis to Chicago
in the spring of 1939, I was speculating rather idly about surface-to-air mis-
siles as a possible means of defense. How could they be controlled? I knew
nothing about radar, of course, but infrared radiation from the exhaust of
the engines seemed a possibility. Was visible radiation out of the question?
I noticed a Bock of birds Bying alongside the train, and it suddenly occurred
to me that I might have the answer in my own research. Why not teach
animals to guide missiles? I went back to Minneapolis and bought some
pigeons. The rest of the story of Project Pigeon has already been told (1960).

THE "BABY BOX"

Toward the end of the Second World War, we decided to have an-
other child. My wife remarked that she did not mind bearing children but
that the first two years were hard to take. I suggested that we mechanize
the care of a baby. There is nothing natural about a crib. Wrapping a baby
in several layers of cloth-undershirt, nightie, sheets, and blankets, with a
mattress underneath-is an inefficient way of maintaining a proper tempera-
ture, and it greatly restricts the child's movements. I built, instead, an en-
closed space in which the baby, wearing only a diaper, could lie on a tightly
stretched woven plastic sheet, the surface of which feels rather like linen
B. F. SKINNER 403

and through which warm air rises, moved by convection or a fan, depending
on the outside temperature.
When our second daughter, Deborah, came home from the hospital,
she went directly into the device and used it as sleeping space for two and
a half years. I reported our happy experience in an article in the Ladies
Home Journal, and many hundreds of babies have been raised in what is
now called an Aircrib. Child care is conservative, and the method has been
adopted fairly slowly, but medical and behavioral advantages should be
studied. Predictions and tales of dire consequences have not been supported.
Deborah broke her leg in a skiing accident but presumably not because of
"the box." Otherwise she has had remarkably good health. She is now in
college, interested in art and music, from Bach to Beatie, and she usually
beats me at chess. To complete the story of the shoemaker's children, our
older daughter, Julie, is married to a sociologist, Ernest Vargas, and is finish-
ing her work for a Ph.D. in educational research. Their first child, Lisa, is
of course, being raised in an Aircrib.

WALDEN TWO

In the spring of ] 945 at a dinner party in Minneapolis, I sat next to

a friend who had a son and a son-in-law in the South Pacific. I expressed
regret that when the war was over they would come back and take up their
old way of life, abandoning their present crusading spirit. She asked me
what I would have them do instead, and I began to discuss an experimental
attitude toward life. I said that some of the communities of the nineteenth
century represented a healthy attitude. She pressed me for details and later
insisted that I publish them. I was unaware that I was taking her seriously.
A paper on "The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms" (1945)
was due on June l , and I met that deadline. Then, to my surprise, I began
to wri te W alden Two (1948). It began simply as a description of a feasible
design for community living. I chose the unoriginal utopian strategy of hav-
ing a few people visit a community. The characters soon took over.
In general I write very slowly and in longhand. It took me two min-
utes to write each word of my thesis and that is still about my rate. From
three or four hours of writing each day I eventually salvage about one
hundred publishable words. Walden Two was an entirely different experi-
ence. I wrote it on the typewriter in seven weeks. It is pretty obviously a
venture in self-therapy, in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects
of my own behavior represented by Burris and Frazier. Some of it was writ-
ten with great emotion. The scene in Frazier's room, in which Frazier de-
fends W alden Two while admitting that he himself is not a likeable person
or fit for communal life, I worked out while walking the streets near our
house in St. Paul. I came back and typed it out in white heat.
404 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I receive a steady trickle of letters from people who have read Walden
Two, want to know whether such a community has ever been established,
and, if so, how they can join. At one time I seriously considered an actual
experiment. It could be one of the most dramatic adventures in the twen-
tieth century. It needs a younger man, however, and I am unwilling to
give up the opportunity to do other things which in the long run may well
advance the principles of Walden Two more rapidly. A conference organized
to consider an actual experiment was recently attended by nearly one hun-
dred people.

INDIANA

In the fall of 1945 I became chairman of the Department of Psychology

at Indiana. I took with me from Minnesota the unfinished manuscript of
Verbal Behavior, the manuscript of Walden Two, the Aircrib with its lovely
occupant, and a miscellaneous lot of apparatus. I was inexperienced as an
administrator, but the department survived my brief chairmanship. I did no
undergraduate teaching, but the chapter in Science and Human Behavior
on self-control is to a large extent the joint product of a seminar in which,
for almost the only time in my life, I successfully managed group thinking.
In spite of my administrative responsibilities I ran a number of experiments
-all with pigeons-on reaction time, differential reinforcement of slow re-
sponding, two operanda, and matching-to-sample. These studies are mostly
reported in "Are Theories of Learning Necessary?" (1950)

THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR

Other people were now beginning to do research along the same lines.
W. K. Estes, who went on to get a Ph.D. at Minnesota, wrote a thesis On
the effects of punishment which became a classic. At Columbia Fred Keller
was teaching graduate students from The Behavior of Organisms and, with
W. N. Schoenfeld, was planning a revolutionary introductory course in
the college. A problem in communication arose, and Keller and I started
what became a series of annual conferences on the Experimental Analysis
of Behavior. Those who attended the first of these at Indiana in the spring
of 1946 are pictured in volume five (1962) of the Journal of the Experi-
mental Analysis of Behavior. Eventually we began to meet at the same time
as the American Psychological Association and later as part of its program.
When Division 3 could no longer provide space or arrange time for our
expanding activities, we took the probably inevitable step of forming a
separate division-Division 25.
Meanwhile, the need for a special journal had become clear. I pro-
B. F. SKINNER 405
posed an inexpensive newsletter, but more constructive OpInIOnS prevailed.
A small holding society was formed and the Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior founded. The history of the discipline can also be
traced in the increasing availability of excellent apparatus, reflecting the
growing complexity and subtlety of the contingencies of reinforcement
under analysis.

HARVARD AGAIN

While giving the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1947, I was

asked to become a permanent member of the department, and we moved
to Cambridge in 1948. Remembering my introductory teaching at Minne-
sota I proposed to add a course in human behavior to the Harvard list.
The first year was nearly a disaster. More than four hundred students, an-
ticipating a "gut" course, signed up. I had no appropriate text and could
only supply hastily prepared mimeographed sheets. My section men were
loyal but puzzled. Later the course was incorporated into the General Edu-
cation program and gradually improved. By 1953 Science and Human Be-
havior was available as a text.
Meanwhile I had set up a pigeon laboratory in which Charles Ferster
and I worked very happily together for more than five years. It was the
high point in my research history. Scarcely a week went by without some
exciting discovery. Perhaps the behavior we dealt with most effectively was
our own. Near the end of our collaboration we found ourselves with a vast
quantity of unanalyzed and unpublished data, and we proceeded to design
an environment in which we could scarcely help writing a book. In it we
both worked as we had never worked before. In one spring term and one
long hot summer we wrote a text and a glossary and prepared over a thou-
sand figures, more than 900 of which were published.
The success of my laboratory in the 1950's and early 1960's was due
in large part to many excellent graduate students, not all of them under
my direction, of whom I may mention Douglas G. Anger, James A. Anliker,
Donald S. Blough, Richard J. Herrnstein (now my colleague on the Har-
vard faculty), Alfredo V. Lagmay, William H. Morse, Nathan H. Azrin,
Ogden R. Lindsley, Lewis R. Gollub, Matthew L. Israel, Harlan L. Lane,
George S. Reynolds, A. Charles Catania, Herbert S. Terrace, and Neil J.
Peterson. With very little direct help from me they all made and are con-
tinuing to make important contributions.

TECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

At Minnesota W. T. Heron and I had studied the effects of certain

drugs on operant behavior. In the 1950's a strong interest in psychopharma-
406 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

cology suddenly developed. Almost all the large drug companies set up
operant laboratories, some only for the screening of new compounds but
many providing an opportunity for basic research. Much of this interest was
generated by Joseph V. Brady of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Peter Dews of the Department of Pharmacology in the Harvard Medical
School began to work in close cooperation with my laboratory and soon
organized an active program in his own department.
In the early 1950's Dr. Harry Solomon, then chairman of the Depart-
ment of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, helped me set up a
laboratory for the study of the operant behavior of psychotics at the Metro-
politan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. Ogden R. Lindsley took
over, and the work he initiated there has now been carried forward in many
other laboratories. Azrin and others have extended operant principles to
the management of psychotic patients in hospital wards, and there is in-
creasing interest in applications to personal therapy.
Sporadic research on operant behavior in children goes back to the
1930's. Sidney Bijou, among others, has been particularly active in apply-
ing the principles of an experimental analysis to the behavior of children
in nursery schools, clinics, and the home. Ferster turned from our work on
schedules to the study of autistic children, and there are now many operant
laboratories for the study of retardates. Almost all these practical applica-
tions have contributed to our understanding of behavior. Fortunately, they
have not overshadowed the basic science; many laboratories continue to
study operant behavior apart from technological significances.
In the late 1930's, looking ahead to the education of our first child, I
began to write a book called Something to Think About. It was never com-
pleted, though I got as far as having an artist work on the illustrations. It
contained examples of what later came to be called programmed intruction.
When our daughters went to school, I showed the usual interest as a parent
but carefully refrained from speaking as a specialist in the field of learn-
ing. In 1953 our younger daughter was in fourth grade in a private school
in Cambridge. On November 11, as a Visiting Father, I was sitting in the
back of the room in an arithmetic class. Suddenly the situation seemed per-
fectly absurd. Here were twenty extremely valuable organisms. Through no
fault of her own the teacher was violating almost everything we knew about
the learning process.
I began to analyze the contingencies of reinforcement which might
be useful in teaching school subjects and designed a series of teaching ma-
chines which would permit the teacher to provide such contingencies for
individual students. At a conference on Current Trends in Psychology at
the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 1954 I demonstrated a ma-
chine to teach spelling and arithmetic. Within a year I found myself caught
up in the teaching machine movement. A series of projects at Harvard led
 B. F. SKINNER 407
eventually to a Committee on Programmed Instruction, in which I had the
invaluable collaboration of James C. Holland.
Economics, government, and religion are farther from psychology than
linguistics, psychotherapy, or education, and few people have the kind of
joint interest needed for an examination of common principles. I have seen
myself moving slowly in this direction, however, and I am now working
under a Career Award from the National Institutes of Health which will
permit me to explore the social sciences from the point of view of an ex-
perimental analysis of behavior.

MY BEHAVIOR AS A SCIENTIST
It is often said that behaviorists do not view themselves as they view
their subjects-for example, that they regard what they say as true in some
sense which does not apply to the statements of the people they study. On
the contrary, I believe that my behavior in writing Verbal Behavior, for
example, was precisely the sort of behavior the book discusses. Whether
from narcissism or scientific curiosity, I have been as much interested in
myself as in rats and pigeons. I have applied the same formulations, I have
looked for the same kinds of causal relations, and I have manipulated be-
havior in the same way and sometimes with comparable success. I would
not publish personal facts of this sort if I did not believe that they throw
some light on my life as a scientist.
I was taught to fear God, the police, and what people will think. As
a result I usually do what I have to do with no great struggle. I try not
to let any day "slip useless away." I have studied when I did not feel like
studying, taught when I did not want to teach. I have taken care of animals
and run experiments as the animals dictated. (Some of my first cumula-
tive records are stamped December twenty-fifth and January first.) I have
met deadlines for papers and reports. In both my writing and my research
I have fought hard against deceiving myself. I avoid metaphors which are
effective at the cost of obscuring issues. I avoid rhetorical devices which
give unwarranted plausibility to an argument (and I sometimes reassure
myself by making lists of the devices so used by others), I avoid the un-
warranted prestige conferred by mathematics, even, I am afraid, when
mathematics would be helpful. I do not spin impressive physiological the-
ories from my data, as I could easily do. I never convert an exploratory
experiment into an experimentum crucis by inventing a hypothesis after
the fact. I write and rewrite a paper until, so far as possible, it says exactly
what I have to say. (A constant search for causes seems to be another prod-
uct of that early environment. When my wife or one of my daughters tells
me that she has a headache, I am likely to say, "Perhaps you have not been
eating wisely" or "You may have been out in the sun too much." It is an
408 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

almost intolerable trait in a husband, father, or friend, but it is an invalu-

able scientific practice.)
I must admit that all these characteristics have been helpful. Max
Weber could be right about the Protestant Ethic. But its effect is only cau-
tionary or restrictive. Much more important in explaining my scientific
behavior are certain positive reinforcements which support Feuer's answer
to Weber in which he shows that almost all noted scientists followed a
"hedonistic ethic." I have been powerfully reinforced by many things: food,
sex, music, art, and literature-and my scientific results. I have built ap-
paratuses as I have painted pictures or modelled figures in clay. I have
conducted experiments as I have played the piano. I have written scientific
papers and books as I have written stories and poems. I have never designed
and conducted an experiment because I felt I ought to do so, or to meet a
deadline, or to pass a course, or to "publish rather than perish." I dislike
experimental designs which call for the compulsive collection of data and,
particularly, data which will not be reinforcing until they have been ex-
haustively analyzed. I freely change my plans when richer reinforcements
beckon. My thesis was written before I knew it was a thesis. Walden Two
was not planned at all. I may practice self-management for Protestant rea-
sons, but I do so in such a way as to maximize non-Protestant reinforcements.
I emphasize positive contingencies. For example, I induce myself to write
by making production as conspicuous as possible (actually, in a cumulative
record). In short, I arrange an environment in which what would otherwise
be hard work is actually effortless.
I could not have predicted that among the reinforcers which explain
my scientific behavior the opinions of others would not rank high, but that
seems to be the case. Exceptions are easily traced to my history. I take a
silly pride in the fact that "Freedom and the Control of Men" (1955-1956)
appears as an example of good contemporary prose in textbooks written for
college freshmen; Miss Graves would have been pleased. But in general my
effects on other people have been far less important than my effects on rats
and pigeons-or on people as experimental subjects. That is why I was able
to work for almost twenty years with practically no professional recognition.
People supported me, but not my line of work; only my rats and pigeons
supported that. I was never in any doubt as to its importance, however, and
when it began to attract attention, I was wary of the effect rather than
pleased. Many notes in my files comment on the fact that I have been de-
pressed or frightened by so-called honors. I forego honors which would take
time away from my work or unduly reinforce specific aspects of it.
That I have never been interested in critical reactions, either positive
or negative, is probably part of the same pattern. I have never actually read
more than half a dozen pages of Chomsky's famous review of Verbal Be-
havior. CA quotation from it which I have used I got from I. A. Richards.)
When Rochelle Johnson sent me a reprint of her reply to Scrivin's criticism
B. F. SKINNER 409
of my position, it only reminded me that I had never read Scrivin. Clark
Hull used to say that I did not make hypotheses because I was afraid of
being wrong. Verbal statements are, indeed, right or wrong, and in some
sense I want my statements to be right. But I am much more interested in
measures for the control of a subject matter. Some relevant measures are
verbal, but even so they are not so much right or wrong as effective or
ineffective, and arguments are of no avail. For the same reason I am not
interested in psychological theories, in rational equations, in factor analyses,
in mathematical models, in hypothetico-dcductive systems, or in other verbal
systems which must be proved right.
Much of this attitude is Baconian. Whether my early and quite acci-
dental contact with Bacon is responsible or not, I have followed his prin-
ciples closely. I reject verbal authority. I have "studied nature not books,"
asking questions of the organism rather than of those who have studied the
organism. I think it can be said, as it was said of Bacon, that I get my books
out of life, not out of other books. I have followed Bacon in organizing my
data. I do not collect facts in random "botanizing," for there are principles
which dictate what Poincare called le choix des faits) and they are not, as
Poincare argued, hypotheses. I classify not for the sake of classification but
to reveal properties.
I also follow Bacon in distinguishing between observation and experi-
mentation. Bacon no doubt underestimated the importance of extending the
range of human sense organs with instruments, but he did so in emphasizing
that knowledge is more than sensory contact. I would put it this way:
Observation overemphasizes stimuli; experimentation includes the rest of
the contingencies which generate effective repertoires. I have also satisfied
myself that Bacon's four Idols can be translated into an acceptable behavioral
analysis of faulty thinking.
My position as a behaviorist came from other sources. Perhaps, like
Jeremy Bentham and his theory of fictions, I have tried to resolve my early
fear of theological ghosts. Perhaps I have answered my mother's question,
"What will people think?" by proving that they do not think at all (but the
question might as well have been "What will people say?"). I used to toy
with the notion that a behavioristic epistemology was a form of intellectual
suicide, but there is no suicide because there is no corpse. What perishes is
the homunculus-the spontaneous, creative inner man to whom, ironically,
we once attributed the very scientific activities which led to his demise.
To me behaviorism is a special case of a philosophy of science which
first took shape in the writings of Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare, and Percy
Bridgman. Bridgman himself could never make the extension to behavior.
He is one man I did argue with. When he published The Way Things Are
(Bridgman, 1959), he sent me a copy with a note: "Here it is. Now do your
damnedest!" I was busy with other things and did nothing. But I could never
have convinced him, for it is not a matter of conviction. Behaviorism is a
410 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

formulation which makes possible an effective experimental approach to

human behavior. It is a working hypothesis about the nature of a subject
matter. It may need to be clarified, but it does not need to be argued. I have
no doubt of the eventual triumph of the position-not that it will eventually
be proved right, but that it will provide the most direct route to a successful
science of man.
I have acknowledged my indebtedness to Bertrand Russell, Watson, and
Pavlov. I never met or even saw Watson, but his influence was, of course,
important. Thorndike (not a behaviorist but still an important figure in a
science of behavior) I met briefly. He knew of my interest in verbal be-
havior and sent me his Studies in the Psychology of Language (Thorndike,
1938). When I wrote to thank him, I told him about my analysis of allitera-
tion and added, "Hilgard's review of my book [The Behavior of Organisms]
in the Bulletin has reminded me of how much of your work in the same
vein I failed to acknowledge ... I seem to have identified your point of
view with the modern psychological view taken as a whole. It has always
been obvious that I was merely carrying on your puzzle box experiments
but it never occurred to me to remind my readers of the fact." Thorndike
replied, "I am better satisfied to have been of service to workers like your-
self than if I had founded a {schooL'"
Walter Hunter I knew well. He gave me professional advice. I recall
his wry smile as he told me, "It only takes one little idea to be a success in
American psychology." (He measured the idea with thumb and forefinger.)
Clark Hull visited my laboratory in Cambridge and made suggestions, which
I never followed. I talked to his seminar at Yale and was invited to the
unveiling of his portrait shortly before he died. I have a bound volume of
my papers which was once on his shelves under the title Experimental Stud-
ies in Learning.
Tolman taught summer school at Harvard in 1931, and we had many
long discussions. I had been analyzing the concept of hunger as a drive. In
my thesis I had called it a "third" variable-that is, a variable in addition to
stimulus and response occupying the intervening position of Sherrington's
synaptic states. I have always felt that Tolman's later formulation was very
similar. When The Behavior of Organisms appeared, he wrote:

I think the two words operant and respondent are swell . . . I do think, as I
have said so many times before, that what you ought to do next is to put in two
levers and see what relationships the functions obtained from such a discrimina-
tion set up will bear to your purified functions where you have only one lever.
No doubt you were right that the "behavior-ratio" is a clumsy thing for getting
the fundamental laws. but it is a thing that has finally to be predicted and some-
one must show the relation between it and your fundamental analysis. I con-
gratulate you on coming through Harvard so beautifully unscathed! ...

P .S. And, of course, I was pleased as Hell to be mentioned in the Preface.

B. F. SKINNER 411

Another behaviorist whose friendship I have valued is J. R. Kantor. In

many discussions with him at Indiana I profited from his extraordinary
scholarship. He convinced me that I had not wholly exorcised all the
"spooks" in my thinking.

THE CONTROL OF BEHAVIOR

I learned another Baconian principle very slowly: "Nature to be com-

manded must be obeyed." Frazier in Walden Two speaks for me here:
I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have
shouted at the subjects of my experiments, "Behave, damn you! Behave as you
ought!" Eventually I realized that the subjects were always right. They always
behaved as they should have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made a
bad prediction.

But that coin has another face: once obeyed, nature can be commanded.
The point of Solomon's House in the New Atlantis, as of The Royal Society
founded on Bacon's model, was that knowledge should be useful. A hundred
years later-in an epoch in which I feel especially at home-Diderot devel-
oped the theme in his Encyclopedic. A hundred years after that, the notion
of progress took on new significance in the theory of evolution. Walden Two
is my New Atlantis; I suppose it could also be said that in applying an ex-
perimental analysis to education I returned to a motto which Bacon as a
child saw in his father's house: l\1oniti l\1eliora (instruction brings progress).
I believe in progress, and I have always been alert to practical significances
in my research.
I began to talk explicitly about the control of human behavior after I
had written Walden Two. Control was definitely in the air during my brief
stay at Indiana. In Science and Human Behavior and the course for which
it was written, I elaborated on the theme. In the summer of 1955, on the
island of Monhegan, Maine, where we had a cottage, I wrote "Freedom and
the Control of Men" for a special issue of the American Scholar (1955-
1956). In it I took a much stronger stand on freedom and determinism. My
position has been rather bitterly attacked, especially by people in the humani-
ties, who feel that it is in conflict with Western democratic ideas and that
it plays down the role of the individual. I have been called Machiavellian,
a Communist, a Fascist, and many other names. The fact is, I accept the
ends of a democratic philosophy, but I disagree with the means which are
at the moment most commonly employed. I see no virtue in accident or in
the chaos from which somehow we have reached our present position. I be-
lieve that man must now plan his own future and that he must take every
advantage of a science of behavior in solving the problems which will neces-
sarily arise. The great danger is not that science will be misused by despots
for selfish purposes but that so-called democratic principles will prevent
412 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

men of goodwill from using it in their advance toward humane goals. I con-
tinue to be an optimist, but there are moments of sadness. I find the follow-
ing in my notebook, dated August 5, 1963.
End of an Era
Last night Deborah and I went to the Gardner Cox's for some music in
their garden. A group of young people, mostly current or former Harvard and
Radcliffe students, sang a Mass by William Byrd. It was a cappella and, for most
of the singers, sight reading. Very well done. The night was pleasant. Ragged
clouds moved across the sky, one of them dropping briefly a fine mist. The garden
has a circular lawn surrounded by shrubs and a few old trees. Half a dozen lights
burned among green branches. Several kittens played on the grass. We sat in small
groups, in folding chairs. Except for a few jet planes the night was quiet and
the music delightful. Kyrie eleison ... I thought of Walden Two and the
B-minor Mass scene. And of the fact that this kind of harmless, beautiful, sensi-
tive pleasure was probably nearing the end of its run. This was Watermusic, float-
ing down the Thames and out to sea. And why?
Phyllis Cox may have answered the question. As I said good night, she
motioned toward the young man who had conducted the music and said, "You
know, he thinks you are a terrible person. Teaching machines . . . a fascist . . ."
Possibly our only hope of maintaining any given way of life now lies with
science, particularly a science of human behavior and the technology to be
derived from it. We need not worry about the scientific way of life; it will
take care of itself. It would be tragic, however, if other ways of life, not
concerned with the practice of science as such, were to forego the same kind
of support through a misunderstanding of the role of science in human affairs.
The garden we sat in that evening once belonged to Asa Gray. In high
school I studied Botany from a text by Gray, called, as I remember it, How
Plants Grow. One passage impressed me so much that I made a copy which
I have kept among my notes for nearly fifty years. It is the story of a radish.
I would reject its purposivism today but not its poetry, for it suggests to me
a reasonable place for the individual in a natural scheme of things.
So the biennial root becomes large and heavy, being a storehouse of nourish-
ing matter, which man and animals are glad to use for food. In it, in the form
of starch, sugar, mucilage, and in other nourishing and savory products. the plant
(expending nothing in flowers or in show) has laid up the avails of its whole
summer's work. For what purpose? This plainly appears when the next season's
growth begins. Then, fed by this great stock of nourishment, a stem shoots forth
rapidly and strongly, divides into branches, bears flowers abundantly, and ripens
seeds, almost wholly at the expense of the nourishment accumulated in the root,
which is now light, empty, and dead; and so is the whole plant by the time the
seeds are ripe.
B. F. SKINNER 413

REFERENCES

Selected Publications by B. F. Skinner

Behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938.

The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychol. Ret'., 1945.
Walden two. New York: Macmillan, 1948.
Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1953.
Freedom and the control of man. American Scholar, special Winter 1955-56,
Vol. 25, No. l.
Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957.
(with C. Ferster). Schedules of reinforcement. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1957.
Cumulative record. (enlarged ed.) New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1961.
(Includes a selection of the author's more important articles.)

Other Publications Cited

Bridgman, P. Logic of modern physics. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

---. The way things are. Cambridge: Harvard, 1959.
Durning-Lawrence, E. Bacon is Shahespeare. London: Gay and Hancock, 1910.
Feuer, L. The scientific intellectual. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Loeb, J. Physiology of the brain and comparative psychology. New York: Put-
nam, 1900.
Mach, E. The science of mechanics, a critical and historical account of its devel-
opment. LaSalle: Ind. Open Court Publ. Co., 1942.
Magnus, R. Korperstellung. Berlin: Springer, 1924.
Pavlov, I. Conditioned reflexes. London: Oxford, 1927.
Richards, I. A. & Ogden, C. K. The meaning of meaning. New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1923.
Russell, B. Philosophy. New York: Norton, 1925.
Sherrington, C. S. The integrative action of the nervous system. New Haven:
Yale, 1906.
Thompson, L. (Ed.) Selected letters of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1964.
Thorndike, E. L. Studies in the psychology of language. Arch. Psychol., 1938,
No. 231.
Watson, J. B. Behaviorism. New York: People's Institute PubI. Co., 1924-25.
---. Psychological care of infant and child. New York: Norton, 1928.
---. Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist. Philadelphia: Lip-
pincott, 1919.
Yule, G. An introduction to the theory of statistics. London: Griffin, 1911.
415
Morris S.Viteles

EARLY EDUCATION AND FAMILY BACKGROUND

I was born in a small village in the Bessarabian region of Russia, border-

ing upon Roumania, on March 21, 1898. My parents migrated to Leeds,
England, when I was approximately six months of age, so that my earliest
recollections are associated with life and education in this Yorkshire city.
My schooling began at age five, and by the time the family left England
to emigrate to the United States, in January 1904, I had already had the
equivalent of the first grade of elementary school education in the United
States. I was enrolled in the first grade of a Philadelphia school immediately
upon arrival and completed my elementary and secondary schooling in
Philadelphia public schools. I was allowed to skip two grades in the eight-
year elementary program. This acceleration, which made possible graduation
from high school at age sixteen, and the completion of the Ph.D. require-
ments in 1921, at age twenty-three, contributed enormously to an early start
in the making of my professional career.
Along with an older sister and an older brother, I was raised in the
milieu of a middle-class Jewish family. My father had been employed as a
manager of forest holdings in Russia. In the United States, he started as a
factory worker but soon entered the restaurant and summer hotel business,
in which he was engaged until retirement in 1931, because of illness.
The economic status of the family was never bad, in the sense that
there were never any lacks in the way of food and basic comforts of life.
The economic status of the family was never good, in the sense that there
was frequently question as to whether outstanding bills would be met or
whether something more than basic comforts could be provided. By the time
I graduated from high school, I was already working to contribute to my
support and continued doing so throughout my college career, as a teacher
in the schools of the Jewish community, made possible by a knowledge of
Hebrew and of history of the people obtained during my early years of reli-
gious training and later through a program of evening studies at Gratz Col-
lege, a Philadelphia center of sectarian learning.
My father had had little in the way of secular education, but he had a
417
418 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

thirst for knowledge and a great respect for scholarship. In the midst of
a very busy life, he found time for reading-even modern works-and time
to discuss with his children what they were learning and reading. His par-
ticular fondness was for music, and I have known him in leaner times to
forego buying a new hat in order to attend the opera. My mother was occu-
pied in maintaining a clean, orderly house and in catering to the needs of
her children and, later, also in doing the cooking in the family restaurant
and hotel business. She had little time to pursue intellectual activities. How-
ever, there was intellectual alertness, and when time became available in
the later years of her life she read avidly and was able to keep up with her
children in discussing current events and other matters of intellectual
interest.
The fact that all their children-including my sister and brother as well
as myself-would go on to a higher education was simply taken for granted
by my parents, even during periods of economic stress. The fact that both
my brother and I went on beyond college, to graduate studies, unquestion-
ably reflects interests and aspirations to which we became accustomed in
early life and the strong support provided by our parents-even to the point
of sacrificing personal welfare-to help us achieve educational goals and
career aspirations.

SECONDARY EDUCATION AND CAREER

CHOICE (1910-1915)

It was within this framework that, in 1910, I enrolled as a freshman in

the Central High School of Philadelphia. My choice among available pro-
grams was the classical course, which included four years of Greek, three
years of Latin, two years of French, extensive content in history, English
language and literature, and also rigorous courses in mathematics and the
basic sciences. Curiously enough, my introduction to psychology came in
high school, in the form of a course entitled Fundamentals of Psychology
taken as an elective during the senior year. There would be a certain ele-
gant consistency in career choice if I were able to say that a course given
by a great teacher of psychology at the high school level led at once into my
professional career. However, I can recall no evidence of this. In fact, what
later attracted me to psychology was entirely absent in the course-given by
a teacher of physics-which brings to mind, in retrospect, what Baldwin, in
volume one of this series, describes as "a sort of propadeutic to metaphysics
and theology, taught in most American colleges," in his student days.
By the end of my senior year in high school, in 1914, I had nevertheless
made a career decision, that of preparing for teaching history in the second-
ary school. However, before another year had elapsed, this choice was re-
placed by a firm decision to seek a career in psychology. The impact toward
MORRIS S. VITELES 419

this decision came primarily from a teacher, named Melville, on the staff
of the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy which I attended, for a year, while
awaiting enrolment in the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship
which had been granted for entrance in the academic year 1915-1916. Mel-
ville never became a great figure in psychology, but he was a dedicated psy-
chologist, with great vision concerning the promise of the new science of
psychology for enhancing our knowledge of mental processes through re-
search. He had an intense interest in individual differences and a broad
view of the possibilities of the objective measurement of such differences in
adapting the educational process to the abilities, interests, and motivation of
the individual. Such views, and others presented with conviction, produced
an interest in psychology and a firm decision to prepare myself for a career
in this field, rather than for that of teaching history.

COLLEGE YEARS (1915-1918)

The decision to become a psychologist was a firm one, but it quickly

became apparent that I must plan my education in such a way as to have
available, upon graduation from college, the funds needed for postgraduate
work. The plan called for preparation at the undergraduate level for teach-
ing history in a secondary school, with the anticipation that employment as
a teacher would provide both the time and the funds for postgraduate study
in psychology.
My undergraduate major in the College of Arts and Sciences was, in
fact, history. I feel sure that my strong and continuing concern with the
historical perspective for graduate study in psychology and my interest in
the history of institutions (such as business) and of social movements (such
as labor organization) comes, in large part, from work done during formative
years with great historians at the University of Pennsylvania. Their influ-
ence is to be seen, I think, in the historical chapter, "Work Through the
Ages," which opens my more or less popular text on industrial psychology,
entitled The Science of Work, published in 1934. However, my strong in-
volvement in history did not preclude progress in other ways toward the
accomplishment of the objective of the educational plan. I managed to fit in
-or really "bootleg" -a few courses in education which helped to meet the
requirements for a secondary school teaching certificate in Pennsylvania.
More important still, in spite of a major in history, my undergraduate courses
in psychology were numerous and varied.
As I think about my undergraduate work in psychology, I detect two
strong trends in the program which, I am sure, greatly influenced the direc-
tion of my interests in the field and the values which I apply in assessing
both my own research and that of others. In the first place, the orientation
of the program was strongly experimental. For example, the introductory
420 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

course included four hours of laboratory work and one hour of lecture per
week during each of two terms-a pattern which was virtually unique for
the era. A second strong feature of the undergraduate instruction which in-
fluenced my development and work in industrial psychology was a strong
concern with individual differences.
These two features of my undergraduate education in psychology were
not chance occurrences. The oldest American laboratory of psychology with
a continuous existence is that organized at the University of Pennsylvania
by James McK. Cattell in 1889. It is highly probable that Cattell, among
the first to hold the title of Professor in Psychology in this country, initiated
the experimental orientation in the program of undergraduate instruction.
There is no question that Lightner Witmer, whose interest in psychology
was aroused by Cattell and who also obtained his Ph.D. under Wundt, was
responsible for maintaining and strengthening this approach when, in 1892,
following Cattell's departure for Columbia, he became director of the labora-
tory of psychology.
The emphasis on differential psychology in the curriculum of the
Department of Psychology also reflected the interests and iniluence of both
Cattell and Witmer. As is well known, Cattell, even as a student of Wundt,
expressed strong objection to the latter's preoccupation with only the central
measures in experimental findings, and Cattell was largely responsible for
the initiation of systematic research on individual differences in the United
States. Witmer, like Cattell, insisted upon the central importance of a knowl-
edge of individual differences for the understanding of human behavior.
The orientations in the teaching of psychology referred to above were
also present in advanced undergraduate courses in psychology. By the time
my senior year was completed, I was already involved in semi-independent
research of the type that frequently was available only in postgraduate work
in other universities. Problems in the area of individual differences were
extensively explored in advanced courses. In addition, several such courses
brought clearly into focus a third feature of instruction in psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania that strongly influenced my later work in the
field of industrial psychology. This was the concern with the study of the
total individual, from the viewpoint of adaptation and maladjustment to
diverse life situations, which is the province of clinical psychology.
Almost forgotten today is the fact that Witmer brought into use the
term "clinical psychology," and organized, in 1897 at the University of
Pennsylvania, a psychological clinic for implementing his views with respect
to the utilization of psychology, along with such associated disciplines as
education and sociology, for the study and promotion of individual adjust-
ment. Clinical psychology did not represent to Witmer a departure from
the scientific and experimental orientation in psychology. In fact, Witmer
protested against the direct application to the schoolroom and elsewhere of
MORRIS S. VITELES 421

the results of laboratory experimentation, in the absence of experimentation

bearing upon and conducted in the life situation (Witmer, 1925). At the
same time, he took a strong stand in the way of directing clinical psychology
toward useful applications, in concordance with his conviction that "in the
final analysis, the progress of psychology, as of every other science, will be
determined by the amount of its contribution to the advancement of the
human race" (Witmer, 1907).

GRADUATE STUDY IN PSYCHOLOGY AND

BEGINNINGS OF MY CAREER AS AN
INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGIST (1918-1922)

The impact of such orientations in undergraduate work in psychology

became stronger when I started graduate work at the University of Pennsyl-
vania. Progress toward a career in psychology came faster than had been
anticipated in my "master plan." Upon graduation from college, in the
spring of 1918, I was awarded a graduate scholarship in history. The pros-
pect for making use of this was, however, slight, since I needed to consider
seriously the question of war service. During the summer of 1918, I made
an effort to enlist in the division for psychological service in the Army directed
by R. M. Yerkes, and, when rejected on the grounds of insufficient prepara-
tion for work in the area, I sought enlistment in the Chemical War Service
of the Army, also without success. Very shortly thereafter I learned of the
Student Army Training Corps (SATC) and, in September of 1918, was
sworn in for officer training in the branch located at the University of Penn-
sylvania.
The SATC program provided for the continuation of studies and the
major portion of time available for graduate studies was devoted to psychol-
ogy. Within a few days after being discharged from the SATe in December
1918, I was offered a position as an assistant in the Department of Psychol-
ogy. On the following day I was offered an instructorship in history. The
firmness of my decision to make a career in psychology is illustrated by my
rejection of that offer, in spite of the doubling of salary which this involved.
In a sense, my professional career as a psychologist started on Decem-
ber 18, 1918, when I started my work as an assistant-more commonly known
as a "dog"-in the Department of Psychology. Although I quite quickly
started to carry a heavy load of work in the department, I was able to move
along with my graduate studies, and to obtain the A.M. degree in June
1919. Both my graduate studies and also my work as an assistant brought
closer associations with Witmer, but even during the first year of graduate
work, and also later, I can see the influence of other staff members.
Outstanding was that exercised by Edwin B. Twitmyer. Although hardly
422 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

known to other psychologists either in the past or now, he was probably the
first psychologist in the United States to observe the conditioned reflex. At
least, his was the first report CTwitmyer, 1902, 1905) on this phenomenon
in the United States-antedating that of Pavlov-but the skepticism and
even ridicule with which his findings, as reported at a meeting of the Amer-
ican Psychological Association in 1904, were received by the pundits of the
day was apparently a potent factor in turning a sensitive and promising
young man away from further research pertaining to either this or other
psychological phenomena. Nevertheless, Twitmyer remained a great teacher,
and to conduct research under his direction proved to be a memorable learn-
ing experience.
Although Twitmyer and a few other members of the Department of
Psychology had an impact upon my development, it is chiefly the influence
of Witmer that is to be seen in much of my work, especially in the 1920's
and early 1930's. E. C. Boring, with his usual perceptiveness, recognized
this and shows me as an offshoot of Witmer on the chart which he has used
to depict the growth and diversification of branches in the family of psychol-
ogists. It is no accident, for example, that my first article described a study
of performance on mental tests and of the school achievement of children
in an orphanage, in comparison with performance of a normative popula-
tion. This and another article, describing a case examined in the psychologi-
cal clinic, were the earliest in a series published during succeeding years
which reflect strong involvement in mental testing, in clinical psychology
and, in more general terms, a leaning toward applied rather than experi-
mental psychology. This preference moved in the direction of industrial
application of psychology in about 1920.
As I consider the question of how and why I became committed to
industrial psychology, it becomes apparent that there was an underlying
receptivity to a career in this field, since I was already interested not only in
psychology and in the individual, but in the social sciences, in social institu-
tions, and in social movements. I read the novels of such authors as Butler,
Wells, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Maeterlinck, and Rolland, not only be-
cause of their literary implications, but also because they were concerned
with problems of social significance. My political and social views as a young
man were what might be called "liberal." My friends came from among
those who were concerned with social welfare and through some of these
-especially the members of two families which produced two justices of
the Supreme Court-I came to know many American and also British liberals
who exercised a great influence on the making of social change in later years.
It seems possible that such views and such experiences helped to pro-
duce a predisposition toward a career that has involved dealing to some
extent with social change. However, it seems quite certain that a number
of books, already available at th~ time, helped to stir my interest in industrial
MORRIS S. VITELES 423

psychology. Among these was the volume by H. C. Link (1919) entitled

Employment Psychology. I was familiar with the informative text on Voca-
tional Psychology by H. L. Hollingworth (1916) and know that this pro-
vided background materials for my work in developing procedures for the
description, analysis, and classification of job requirements. I feel quite sure,
too, that the classic text Psychology and Industrial E{ftciency by Munsterberg
(1913) was known to me, but it was not until somewhat after the events
described above that I came to consider his program in detail. On the other
hand, I feel quite sure that in the years under consideration I had not read
the book Influencing Men in Business by W. D. Scott (I911), and had
little, if any familiarity with his activities and those of others at the Carnegie
Institute of Technology.
While I cannot now properly assess the influence of the factors dis-
cussed above, I am certain that three events, occurring during the period
1918 to 1920, definitely foreshadowed a commitment to industrial psychol-
ogy. The first was an opportunity, early in 1919, to observe the work of
counselors and to assess the possibility for psychological research in the
Philadelphia office of the Federal Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation. There
was little interest on the part of the chief administrator of the Philadelphia
office in this project, which had been suggested by a junior staff member.
However, the situation quickly changed when I undertook to construct and
put into use a short test of reading proficiency after a counselor had brought
embarrassment to the agency by recommending training in bookkeeping for
a veteran who could not read. I made a sufficiently good impression in this
and other ways to be given a paid job in the agency during the summer of
1919. By the fall, when I returned to continue graduate work and to my
job as an assistant-in spite of the opportunity to triple my salary by con-
tinuing to work for the federal government-I was already much aware of
the potential of work in the area of vocational assessment both as a promising
career and as a source of personal satisfaction.
The second significant event was participation in a study group on
vocational guidance, conducted by Arthur J. Jones, Professor of Education
at the University of Pennsylvania, during the academic year 1919-20.
This strengthened my awareness of the promise of psychology and of psy-
chological techniques for the study of job requirements and for the measure-
ment of vocational aptitudes, and furthermore, of the need for research in
this area.
The two experiences described above had an initial impact in directing
my attention to vocational guidance and in leading me to undertake, in
1921, the organization, within the framework of the psychological clinic, of
a vocational guidance clinic which, so far as I know, was the first center for
teaching, research, and service associated with a university, specifically de-
voted to the application of tests and clinical methods for purposes of voca-
424 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tional guidance. However, I see this also as a step in progress toward a

career in industrial psychology, because of the close connection between the
two areas, at least insofar as the assessment of vocational competence is con-
cerned. Nevertheless, as will appear later, industrial psychology gradually
became my predominant interest.
This shift of interest is already to be observed in the events noted above,
since, for example, my work with the study group in vocational guidance
resulted in a paper "Tests in Industry" (1921), which not only deals with
the implications of job analysis anti tests for the selection of workers, but
takes issue with what was then the prevailing common practice of placing
almost exclusive reliance upon the measurement of general intelligence for
assessing vocational aptitudes. This view was further expanded in an article
I published soon after (1922a) which raises questions concerning the gen-
erality of "intelligence" itself, as measured by available tests. I still find
gratification in the fact that this was later noted by Spearman ( 1927) as a
"damaging criticism," of assumptions pertaining to the dimensions of human
ability and of work in intelligence testing.
Perhaps even more pertinent, among initial impacts toward commit-
ment to a career in industrial psychology, was a third event, in the form of
a research project, involving an analysis of job requirements and the devel-
opment of selection tests conducted, in 1920, in the Naval Aircraft Factory
at the United States Navy Shipyard in Philadelphia. The opportunity to
conduct the study was made available through the good offices of Joseph H.
Willits, at that time Assistant Professor of Geography and Industry at the
University of Pennsylvania, who later became Dean of the Wharton School
of Finance and Commerce and, still later, Director for the Social Sciences,
Rockefeller Foundation. The research experience was interesting and valu-
able, but I value it more as the beginning of a long and rewarding associa-
tion with Willits to whom I owe much for introducing me to the broader
areas of industrial relations; for helping me gain insight into the problems
involved in working with people in industry; for helping enrich my under-
standing of the broader social problems of industry and of the social obliga-
tions of professional consultants in the industrial situation.
It is within the framework of the events and experiences noted above
that, in the summer of 1920, there came my first opportunity to conduct
research as a paid consultant in an industrial organization. The invitation
to do so came from Arthur J. Rowland, who, in 1919, as the administrator
of the Philadelphia office of the Federal Bureau of Vocational Rehabilita-
tion, had looked so skeptically at the possibility of applying tests and other
psychological techniques and psychological principles in vocational counsel-
ing. Rowland had left Philadelphia to become Director of Education in The
Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company and, in 1920, he approached
me with the suggestion that I come to Milwaukee for the summer in order
MORRIS S. VITELES 425

to investigate the possibility of developing a test for the selection of street

car motormen.
My association with this company, which was carried on through long
visits during holidays and recesses at the University and through correspond-
ence involving the direction of research on the motormen selection test and
other problems, continued until the middle of 1922. One of the chief out-
comes of my work with T.M.E.R.&L. Company was the validation of an
instrument (Viteles Motorman Selection Test), later cross-validated by Shel-
low, which is still being used in the selection of motor vehicle operators
(1925; Shellow, 1925). I also quickly became aware of the wider potentials
of psychology in areas of training, accident prevention, employee-supervisory
relations, and so forth, and had an opportunity to initiate work in these
areas. Perhaps most important is the fact that my experience with the Mil-
waukee Railway & Light Company led me to think about standard methods
for the study, description, and classification of job requirements and resulted
in the formulation of the concepts and methodology for constructing job
psychographs and what are now called "job families." This work, as origi-
nally reported in my doctoral dissertation (1922b), led, among other devel-
opments, to the now widely known method of analyzing worker trait require-
ments used by the U.S. Employment Service (Stead, et al., 1940) and has
otherwise come to be known as an important contribution to the methodol-
ogy of industrial psychology.
The last and most far-reaching consequence of my work with The Mil-
waukee Electric Railway & Light Company was the conviction that contin-
ued association with the academic atmosphere was necessary for me both to
achieve personal satisfaction and to provide the basis for worthwhile con-
tributions to the field of industrial psychology. During discussions held in
the summer of 1921, after I had been awarded the Ph.D. degree, I accepted
an offer to join the company on a full-time basis at the close of the academic
year 1921-1922. I remember the discussions with my father after this deci-
sion had been made. While he was very much pleased that I was invited
to join a large industrial organization, he nevertheless was much upset by
my decision to leave the University, on the grounds that he felt that my
life could best be lived as a "scholar." The same opinion was emphatically
expressed by Arthur J. Jones, who predicted with no equivocation that I
would be returning to university life.
In spite of the views expressed by my father and Jones, I continued
to plan for separation from the University of Pennsylvania. However, with
each passing month I found myself questioning my decision more and more.
This was the situation when, in December 1921, I saw a notice concerning
the availabilitv of American Field Service Fellowships for study in France.
Study in Fra~ce seemed particularly appropriate both because of my com-
petency in reading and speaking French, and by reason of the opportunities
426 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

which were available for study in areas, particularly motivation and psycho-
pathology, in which I felt the need for an enrichment of knowledge. And,
as a sort of gilding of the lily, was the prospect of work with Pierre Janet,
with whose contributions in psychopathology I had become quite familiar
through readings and to whom I was strongly attracted.
The result was a hastily prepared application for study at the U niver-
sity of Paris and the College de France. Notice of the award of the fellow-
ship in the spring of 1922 placed me in a serious quandary, since I had
made a commitment to join The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Com-
pany. This was ended, however, by acceptance of the fellowship with the
very reluctant "blessing" of the company.

A YEAR OF STUDY AND TRAVEL IN

EUROPE (1922-1923)

The year in Europe actually started in July 1922, since needs for per-
sonnel by the American Joint Distribution Committee in Europe, and the
knowledge of my interests by my brother, who was associated with this
organization, led to my employment to conduct a trade education survey in
the eastern portion of Czechoslovakia, including the Slovakian and sub-
Carpathian areas of this country. While the summer yielded good results in
terms of valuable work experience and also in the opportunity to travel and
to become acquainted with the cultures of central Europe, it was my studies
in Paris and the opportunity to learn about work in industrial psychology in
Western European countries that made my year abroad a rewarding one.
With the few exceptions noted below, I did not attend courses regu-
larly during the year in Paris, but devoted myself to sampling various
courses, observing the work done in laboratories and clinics, and taking ad-
vantage of every opportunity to meet and talk with psychologists and scholars
in other fields (1923a). Among the courses which I did attend regularly was
that given by Janet at the College de France. I still have vivid recollections
of the sixty minutes (never more nor less) of the always lucid and scintil-
lating lectures upon theory and practices in dealing with mental aberrations.
The skill with which he could dissect theories-always with good taste-is
something never to be forgotten. Janet not only contributed much to my
knowledge of psychopathology, but he also raised the level of my aspira-
tions with respect to performance as a teacher. Only one other individual
exercised an influence in this respect approaching that of Janet, namely
Stokowski, whose virtuosity in drawing-out and coordinating the tones of
diverse orchestral instruments I saw as a pattern of what the teacher should
be doing with the diverse students in the classroom.
In the field of psychopathology, my program included also regular at-
MORRIS S. VITELES 427

ten dance at the lectures on abnormal psychology given by C. Dumas and at

his clinics, conducted on Sunday mornings at either the Cliniqe Asile or
Cliniqe St. Anne, I forget which. The way in which he handled cases in
his clinic and his clear and insightful discussion of the problem under con-
sideration presented impressive examples to the clinician and the teacher in
the field.
The chief representative of classical experimental psychology at the
University of Paris at the time was Henri Pieron. While I neither took
courses nor conducted research under his direction, I carne to know him
well and to appreciate intensely his happy faculty for combining a strong
concern for theory and experimental psychology with a strong and fruitful
interest in applied psychology, and he did much to make me aware of the
importance of the theoretical framework for research in applied psychology.
In this and in many other ways, I benefitted from and cherish the associa-
tions which I had with him in 1922-1923 and throughout the years which
followed.
There was little activity in the field of industrial psychology in France
during the early 1920's. However, I became acquainted with the work of
J. M. Lahy who as early as 1905 had conducted a study of psychophysio-
logical factors in learning by typists and later conducted research in many
other areas, including the selection of motor vehicle operators. I was not at-
tracted to Lahy's work, although we became great friends in the years which
followed and found much in common through our mutual interest in the
International Psychotechnical Association (known since 1955 as the Inter-
national Association of Applied Psychology), of which he was Secretary-
General for many years. Knowledge of the way in which he was hounded
by the Nazis during the occupation, because of his associations with USSR,
and of his unhappy end are among my sadder recollections.
In terms of professional development, the fellowship year produced
another major impact in the way of an opportunity to learn about what was
going on in industrial psychology through fairly extended visits to England
and Germany. In both of these countries, work in industrial psychology,
stimulated by World War I, was expanding at a rapid rate (l923b). As of
1922, approximately twenty large concerns in Germany had their own psy-
chological laboratories, and institutes for the industrial application of psychol-
ogy were to be found in all of the larger cities in Germany. In England
the Industrial Fatigue Research Board (later the Industrial Health Research
Board), organized in 1915, already had completed or had under way a large
number of investigations. The National Institute of Industrial Psychology,
established by C. S. Myers in 1921, was functioning actively. Psychologists
attached to universities, such as T. H. Pear at Manchester and J. Drever at
Edinburgh, were engaged in investigations bearing upon the applications
of psychology in business.
428 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

What impressed me most in both Germany and England was the scope
of the program in industrial psychology as contrasted with the predominant
commitment to personnel selection and classification on the part of indus-
trial psychologists in the United States. The Europeans were also working
in this area, but, to a much greater extent than in the United States, indus-
trial psychologists were doing research in the area of training and methods
and conditions of work, including wage payment systems-as related partic-
ularly to fatigue and boredom-and, to some extent, with the study of indus-
trial organization. Also more evident, particularly in England, was a greater
interest than was to be found in the United States in the adjustment of the
individual and the welfare of society as distinct goals in the application of
psychology in industry.
In general, I was impressed by the amount of work being done in Ger-
many and much less impressed by the quality of much of the work. There
were exceptions, as in the case of the activities of F. Giese, O. Lipmann,
and W. Stern, and of investigators in the area of the physiology of work.
Nevertheless, largely under the inHuence of W. Moede and G. Piorkowski,
industrial psychology in Germany had moved in the direction of "psycho-
technology." In contrast was the persistent effort on the part of industrial
psychologists in England to relate what they were doing to basic laboratory
research in experimental psychology and to theory.
This effort was particularly apparent in the work of Myers, whose
earlier broad interests in cultural anthropology and applied psychology had
led him, in 1921, to leave his post as director of the Psychological Laboratory
at Cambridge to organize the National Institute of Industrial Psychology
-to move, in his own words, from "the fairly peaceful academic life at
Cambridge in pure psychology to a wider, less tranquil life in applied psy-
chology in London." Myers consistently underlined the research aspect of
the institute's work and insisted that psychologists engaged in research in
industry must continually look to the pure sciences of psychology and physi-
ology for guidance, and that such research could bring important returns to
these sciences in the way of revealing wide gaps in knowledge and suggest-
ing important problems for laboratory research. I am sure that his views
strongly influenced the position on the role of an experimental and theoreti-
cal framework in industrial psychology taken in my book Industrial Psychol-
ogy and also in later years-in fact, until the present time.
Myers may have influenced both my career and my outlook in other
ways. I was excited by his cultural interests and breadth of knowledge out-
side of the field of psychology. His quiet sense of humor, his well-balanced
tolerance, the quality of Myers' relations with his associates in the National
Institute of Industrial Psychology and with other colleagues, and the sym-
pathy with which he dealt with ideas which were not congruent with his
own made more than a casual impression upon me.
MORRIS S. VITELES 429

PROGRESS IN THE MAKING OF A CAREER

IN INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY (1923-1934)

I enjoyed and profited from the fellowship year, but I was also happy
to return, in June 1923, to my teaching at the University of Pennsylvania
and to my work in industrial psychology and vocational guidance. One im-
portant event which occurred shortly thereafter was my promotion, in 1925,
from instructor to the rank of assistant professor.
Almost immediately after my return, I again became active in indus-
trial work. On April 1, 1924, I became associated with the Yellow Cab Com-
pany of Philadelphia and continued to act as consultant to this company
until 1965, except for the period between 1927 and 1936. Most of my work
here was in the area of personnel selection and research and consultation
on accident prevention. However, I also became involved with labor rela-
tions and conducted a number of studies bearing upon both labor negotia-
tions and the arbitration of grievances. A gratifying aspect of my work came
from my associations with E. S. Higgins, president of the company, who
vividly stated what I think should be one of the functions of a consulting
industrial psychologist in describing me as his "intellectual irritant" -a func-
tion which was carried out almost as frequently in the course of long rides
on horseback over trails in the parks of Philadelphia as in the offices of the
company.
My major commitment in industry through the years, from the view-
point of both time and scope of responsibility, has been with the Philadel-
phia Electric Company, which I joined in 1927. Being invited to join the
company was, in a sense, a "stroke of luck" since just a few days before I
was asked to consider doing so I had resigned from the Yellow Cab Com-
pany of Philadelphia, because of dissatisfaction with the atmosphere created
by the management of the organization, Philadelphia Rapid Transit Com-
pany, which had purchased the company.
My original engagement with the electric company was as a consultant
for a period of one year, to be spent in the development of tests for the
selection of electric substation operators. By the end of that time I had made
considerable progress in the validation of a test battery which has, in fact,
consistently yielded satisfactory outcomes, both at the Philadelphia Electric
Company and elsewhere, in helping to reduce the number of operating
errors (I930a). I also quickly became involved in other matters-and in
1930 I was given the status of a "regular" employee, with the title of Director
of Personnel Research and Training.
My associations with the Philadelphia Electric Company continued un-
til the end of September 1964, when I requested retirement in order to
 430 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

assume new duties at the University. It is not possible to deal in any detail
with the great variety of activities in which I was involved during my years
with this company. The preparation and validation of tests for selection pur-
poses was extended through the years to the point where these are used in
employment for all entry jobs, with the exception of sales jobs. An interest-
ing and possibly unique activity was that of developing a series of trade
knowledge and trade skill tests to the point where virtually all promotions
in manual and office jobs in the company now include the requirement of
passing such qualifying examinations. My program with the compai y in-
volved the development of an extensive series of training programs, includ-
ing those devoted to training of management personnel (1933a, 1946). In
fact, I think that a training program given to practically all members of the
supervisory personnel in 1933 and 1934 represents one of the earliest man-
agement development programs in the country. Attitude measurement and
even a little work on the design of electric substation instrument and control
boards are among the other activities in which I was engaged.
I feel much disturbed because space limitations make it possible to de-
vote only these few lines to nearly forty years of work which, as a matter of
fact, has been cited as representing a contribution to the well-being of the
Philadelphia Electric Company in its official history (Wainwright, 1961).
Furthermore, I feel that I am doing many of my former associates an in-
justice by failing to list the names of all who contributed to my own accom-
plishments. There is, nevertheless, need for special mention of the many
ways in which George W. Fewkes, as Manager of the Personnel Depart-
ment, facilitated my work and, also, to acknowledge the encouragement and
support given by members of the executive staff-most particularly N. E.
Funk, H. P. Liversidge, W. H. Taylor, and R. G. Rincliffe.
As I write this, I begin to suspect that the reader may be wondering
whether I did any work at the University. The fact is that, except for the
years in which I was involved in the World War II effort, I carried a full
teaching load. I developed new courses at the undergraduate level, including
an introductory course for students in the school of business, courses in dif-
ferential psychology, vocational psychology, and so forth, and also a program
of graduate instruction in industrial psychology. I participated fully in other
responsibilities generally assigned to department personnel. This was made
possible chiefly by an adjustment of my work schedule, which consisted
largely of rostering some of my courses on Saturdays so that I could have an
extra free day during the week, in addition to the usual free day granted
as a matter of policy to every staff member. This concession involved, of
course, recognition of the fact that I could not hope to contribute to the
development of the new field of industrial psychology unless I became thor-
oughly conversant with industry and was in a position to utilize the indus-
trial organization as my research laboratory.
I continued also to act as director of the Vocational Guidance Clinic
MORRIS S. VITELES 431

at the University and to be involved with the vocational guidance move-

ment. Most particularly, during the early 1930's, I participated in the work
of the National Occupational Conference. Meetings held in various parts of
the countries at which local workers had an opportunity "to meet the ex-
perts" proved to be exciting experiences which contributed to my under-
standing of the practical problems of guidance in the school situation. How-
ever, the experience also increased an already growing dissatisfaction with
work in the area that led to withdrawal from active involvement in the field
of vocational guidance. I have a few publications in the area subsequent to
1934, including a volume entitled Vocational Guidance Throughout the
World, written in collaboration with F. J. Keller (1938) and also a critical
assessment of psychological research in vocational guidance, written as late
as 1961 (with A. H. Brayfield & L. E. Tyler, 1961). However, my active
interest in the area has progressively decreased since about 1935.
By contrast, both my own recollections and my publications reveal a
growing commitment to industrial psychology during approximately the
decade in question. There were occasional forays into other areas (see 1928,
1929), but the majority of my publications at the time are in the field of
industrial psychology. Of particular significance among these, in terms of
career development, was a series of comprehensive reviews of the literature,
written at the request of the editor, for the Psychological Bulletin (I926,
1928, 1930b). I recall that, upon receiving the first of these reviews, the
editor expressed great surprise with respect to the scope of industrial psy-
chology since, in common with the other academic psychologists of the time,
he had thought of industrial psychology as generally synonymous with per-
sonnel testing and classification. The three reviews, which covered approxi-
mately 1000 titles culled from at least double that number of books and articles
published in the United States and abroad, led directly to the preparation of
my book Industrial Psychology (1932) which was followed shortly by a con-
densed, semipopular version entitled The Science of Work (1934).
Publication of Industrial Psychology represents, I think, the most im-
portant of my activities during the period 1923-1934, at least in terms of
the recognition which it brought and of my impact upon industrial psychol-
ogy both in the United States and abroad. The book received very favorable
reviews both in the psychological literature and elsewhere, as illustrated by
the reference to it as the "Bible" of industrial psychology at a meeting of
the British Psychological Association which I addressed in 1935. I was re-
minded of this only recently when the book was again referred to in the
same terms by the chairman of the meeting which I addressed in Washing-
ton. The book, in my opinion, is still a basic source, in the sense of provid-
ing necessary background for research today and even in foreshadowing cur-
rent events, but I begin to suspect that, like the Bible, it is to be more
frequently found on the book shelves than on the reading tables of the new
generation of industrial psychologists.
432 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The story of the years under consideration would be incomplete if I

failed to mention at least some of the many people with whom I associated
during the period and who had an influence on my career. I recall, with
gratitude, S. W. Fernberger's practice of making a point of introducing me
to his many friends at meetings of the American Psychological Association.
It was through him, in the main, that I came to know J. F. Dashiell, R. S.
Woodworth, E. C. Boring, Knight Dunlap, H. S. Langfeld, S. I. Franz, and
other well-known American psychologists who, at least in an indirect way,
may have helped to direct my thinking and to formulate my goals.
Among those who contributed more directly to the development of my
career was W. V. Bingham. He made it possible for me to participate in
meetings organized by the Personnel Research Foundation. He encouraged
me to write and publish my speeches and articles in the Journal of Personnel
Research (later the Personnel Journal), which he edited for many years,
and showed his interest in me in many other ways. In a curious kind of
way, Bingham did all of this in spite of very significant differences in our
backgrounds and outlooks that became apparent from time to time. We be-
came and remained good friends in our work in this country in spite of
such differences, and we saw much of each other as United States members
of the Executive Committee of the International Psycho technical Association.
During the years in question, I came to know Elton Mayo. He had been
brought to the University of Pennsylvania by Willits. While I never felt
quite comfortable with the looseness of his research and with the extent to
which his observations and conclusions were determined by his own particu-
lar perspectives, I was impressed and influenced by the broad view he took
with respect to the social role of business and by his efforts to deal with
emotional aspects of behavior in industry. It was also through Mayo that
I became interested in considering the role of the psychiatrist and of the
psychiatric orientation in dealing with personnel problems, although I also
soon came to question both the validity and practical value of the psychiatric
approach (see 1929). Nevertheless, I see Mayo as an intellectual catalyst in
dealing with human problems in industry and, also, as being largely respon-
sible for such important concepts as came out of the Hawthorne experiments
which, however, for various reasons I have come to call the Legend of the
Hawthorne Works (1959).
Among members of my own generation with whom I established par-
ticularly close friendships were Donald C, Paterson and Arthur W. Korn-
hauser. Paterson and I had similar views on many issues, and I always felt
close to him-as reflected in an address given by me at a testimonial meeting
in his honor held in September 1960 (with A. H. Brayfield & L. E. Tyler,
1961), I established an even closer Friendship with Kornhauser. We had
much in common in the way of a highly critical attitude and of little hesita-
tion in expressing our opinions. At meetings of the American Psychological
Association, we came to be known as "the raspberry twins" because of the
MORRIS S. VITELES 433

frequency with which-although quite independently of one another-we

chose to express disagreements and criticisms of the speakers. This does not
mean that we always agreed with each other, but this did not mar our re-
spect for one another or our friendship. I could mention many other psychol-
ogists working in industry and in other applied fields-such as H. E. Burt,
D. Fryer, H. D. Kitson, H. C. Link, B. V. Moore, L. ]. O'Rourke, E. K.
Strong, and M. Trabue-but any effort to assess their impact would be oner-
ous for me and boring for readers of this chapter.
There remains, however, the need to mention inlluences that grew out
of associations with psychologists abroad. In 1926 I attended the meeting of
the International Congress of Psychology in Groningen, Holland, and in
1928 the meeting of the International Congress of Psychotechnology in
Utrecht. During both years I also visited universities and other research
centers in many Western European countries and thereby had opportunities
to meet many of the European psychologists-to establish the personal con-
tacts and to initiate the exchange of publications which through the years
have helped me to keep in close touch with what was going on in industrial
psychology abroad.

A YEAR IN THE USSR (1934-1935)

In general, the years 1923 through 1934 represent the most productive
period of its length within the span of my career. Be this as it may, toward
the end of the ten-year period I was beginning to feel "fed-up" and started
to think about the possibility of going abroad for another year of study and
intellectual refreshment, and late in 1933 I applied for a Social Science
Research Council Fellowship, for study and observation in the USSR.
When the fellowship was awarded, I found myself in the same quandary
that had faced me in 1922 when I received the fellowship for study in Paris.
However, this was happily resolved by favorable action on the request for
a year's leave from my work at the Philadelphia Electric Company which
was, in fact, accompanied by word that the company would pay half of my
salary while I was on leave . .I had already been granted leave by the U ni-
versity of Pennsylvania, and my wife Rebecca-to whom I have been most
happily married since 1931-and I prepared for departure early in August
of 1934.
The selection of the USSR for the fellowship year was made not only
because I felt that it would be of interest and importance to know what was
going on in the way of psychological research and practice, but also because
of an interest in learning about what was then known as the "great experi-
ment" in social change. I had met a few of the Russian psychologists at the
international congress in Utrecht in 1928, and again at Yale in 1929, and
also had an opportunity to talk to 1. N. Spielrein and others in the course of
 434 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

the International Congress of Applied Psychology held in Prague in Septem-

ber 1934, which I attended en route to Moscow. Nevertheless, I arrived in
the USSR with little specific foreknowledge of what I might find of interest
in my field.
In spite of rather rigid restrictions placed upon work and travel by for-
eigners, I managed to visit most of the important centers in the European
section of the USSR. Actually, I acquired unusual freedom of movement
because of the replacement of my "tourist" visa by a "foreign specialist" visa
which was obtained largely because of the intervention of Spielrein. I some-
times wonder whether the loss of his job and his banishment to what was
for him the unhealthy climate of Tashkent were associated with the fact
that he had been so close to a foreigner, as well as with the fact that he was
one of the Hold Bolsheviks" who were so freely liquidated in 1935.
In the course of my stay in the USSR, I came to know some of the
experimental and also educational psychologists such as K. N. Kornilov,
A. R. Luria, A. N. Leontiev, N. D. Levitov, M. B. Sokolov, A. A. Smirnov,
and others. However, my attention was focused on industrial psychology,
and I found that there had indeed been considerable progress in the devel-
opment of a program in this area in the USSR. In general, the distribution
of research activities was much more like that of Western Europe than that
in the United States in terms of the relative emphasis upon areas other than
employee selection, although there was considerable activity in this direc-
tion, at least until testing was officially denounced as an evil practice in
1935. Much attention was being given to the application of principles of
learning to the training of workers and also to research on training problems.
There was much research on rest pauses, methods of work, machine design,
and so forth, from the viewpoint of fatigue elimination. This, to a much
greater extent than in other countries, involved a team approach which
coordinated the efforts of psychologists, physiologists, time and motion study
men, and others concerned with the fatigue phenomenon. Several of the
industrial psychologists were concerned with problems of motivation. Para-
doxically, however, piece-rate systems and other wage incentive plans, em-
bodying extremely large wage differentials, were being used on a scale
unknown in "bourgeois capitalistic countries." Significantly, this was de-
fended on the ground that it was employee enthusiasm for "voluntary
socialistic competition" which produced the increased production that, in
Western countries, would have been largely attributed to the wage incentive
itself.
In one respect I found the practice of industrial psychology to be very
much like that in the United States, in the form of a predominant emphasis
on increasing production. On the whole, I concluded that in industry in the
USSR there were much the same problems that were to be found in plants
in "capitalistic" countries, and also that these-as is still apparent in the
USSR today-could not be solved by dependence on unsubstantiated social
dogma.
MORRIS S. VITELES 435

I had many opportunities to observe the pernicious effects of political

and social ideology upon science and scientists. For example, I brought back
to the United States data from an experiment on transfer effects, conducted
by a leading psychologist, which could not be published in the USSR be-
cause the conclusions were not in accord with the official party line bearing
upon methods to be used in training the masses to overcome technical illiter-
acy. Pavlov, with whom I spent a little time in Leningrad in 1935, had been
leading his life as though there had been no change in the political regime
in his country, even to the point of closing his laboratories on Sundays in
spite of the official six-day work week with staggered days of rest observed
in industry and schools throughout the country. However, even Pavlov had
reached the point of being unable to obtain an exit visa for one of his stu-
dents who had been granted a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation
for study in the United States.
I discovered that my book Industrial Psychology had been translated
into Russian and was available in the university libraries in mimeographed
form. However, two chapters-dealing with the nature and origins of indi-
vidual differences-had not been reproduced. Not long after my arrival, I
was asked to cooperate in the preparation of an official translation for which,
upon publication, royalties would be paid to me. I found it necessary to
refuse to do so upon learning that it would be necessary for me to revise
these chapters in order to bring them into accord with official Communist
ideology concerning the nature and origin of individual differences. The
request that this be done strikingly reflects the enforced marriage between
political ideology and science which led, for example, to the elimination of
the work of the "pedologists" and the use of tests in schools and in industry
in 1935, shortly after Lysenko won his battle with the traditional geneticists
and his views became the official doctrine for dealing with problems in the
field of genetics. I could describe many other incidents which led me to
close an article on industrial psychology in Russia with a word that their
progress is a "tribute to the sincerity and integrity of Russian scientists who
must struggle not only against the inadequate financial support which ham-
pers scientific workers throughout the world, but also against the intolerance
of a political creed and system, which denies to them the freedom of thought
and opinion that is basic to real accomplishment in every field of science"
(1938a, pp. 18-19).

A PERIOD OF "SETTLEMENT" (1935-1940)

Upon returning to the United States in the summer of 1935, I resumed

my activities at the University-now at the rank of associate professor-and
also my work with the Yellow Cab Company of Philadelphia and the Phila-
delphia Electric Company. The period from 1935 to approximately 1940
was, with few exceptions, devoted to continuing what I had already been
436 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

doing and represented a relatively calm period of "settlement" into my career.

This does not mean that I settled into a rut, from either the viewpoint
of writing or of undertaking new projects. When Frederick J. Keller, who
was then directing the work of the National Occupational Conference,
visited me in the USSR, we talked about the idea which he had conceived
of jointly writing a book describing and comparing vocational guidance prD-
grams throughout the world. I started work on this soon after my return
and, as noted earlier, the book was published in 1938 (with F. J. Keller,
1938). Although many years have elapsed since the writing of Vocational
Guidance Throughout the Warld, it still represents, I think, a unique con-
tribution to the literature of vocational guidance.
During the same five-year period I also prepared two chapters on voca-
tional psychology for a text, Fields of Psychology, edited by J. P. Guilford
( 1940) and also approximately twenty articles in various technical and
other journals. As I review these, I detect a continuing interest in the cri-
terion problem (1936a) and concern with the academic program for train-
ing industrial psychologists (1941 a) and with their responsibility to indus-
try and to society at large. Moreover, I find indications of a growing interest
in the problem of employee motivation ( 1938b, 1941b) which, as will be
seen later, grew in the succeeding years and resulted in a major publication
in this area.
As the decade of the 1940's approached, the publisher of Industrial
Psychology suggested that there would be merit in bringing out a revised
edition in 1942, ten years after the original publication of this book. My
work at the University (where I was promoted to full professor in 1940)
and in industry was going well, and I responded favorably to this sugges-
tion and started to assemble materials and to plan the revision. However,
I did not get far with this, because even before World War II started I
was drawn into a series of projects sponsored by civilian and military agen-
cies of the federal government which grew in magnitude with our entry
into World War II in December 1941.

WORK ON MILITARY PROJECTS (1940-1951)

My first association with such a project was as a representative of

the National Research Council on the Technical Board for the Occupa-
tional Research Program of the U.S. Employment Service. This involved
participation, with M. R. Trabue, W. Dietz, W. H. Stead, C. L. Shartle
and others, in laying the groundwork for what became an extensive pro-
gram in research and for the widespread application of psychology in job
analysis and in occupational placement, both for civilian and military pur-
poses.
My first association with a project pointing directly toward the mili-
MORRIS S. VITELES 437

tary applications of psychology came in the form of research on behalf of

the U.S. Navy, in 1940, on the effects of atmospheric conditions and noise
upon the performance, physiological states, and attitudes of personnel in
plotting and charting rooms of naval vessels. This was conducted in col-
laboration with Kingsley R. Smith, a former student whom, along with J. L.
Otis and Albert S. Thompson, I consider to be among the best of those who
took their degrees under my direction (with K. R. Smith, 1946). The ex-
periment provided evidence that an effective temperature (ET) of 94 OF was
highly detrimental to performance and also to individual well-being. Most
important were clear indications-noted for the first time in any experiment
-of a "danger zone," at the level of approximately 87°ET, which suggested
the need for experiments with effective temperatures of 80°F and 90°F to
determine more exactly the point at which atmospheric conditions became
critical for performance. I find considerable satisfaction in the confirma-
tion, provided in later experiments by Mackworth (1948, 1950) and Pepler
(1953), of the existence of a critical area within the range of effective
temperature of 83°F and 87.5°F on a variety of tasks.
My longest association with the military and its problems was in the
field of aviation psychology. This started in 1940 when, with the collabora-
tion of A. S. Thompson, I undertook research on the development of ob-
jective measures of Bight performance for use as criteria in evaulating the
outcomes of studies on the selection and training of civilian aircraft pilots.
This project was part of a program sponsored by the National Research
Council Committee on Selection and Training of Civilian Aircraft Pilots
which had been organized in 1940, largely through the foresight and in-
Huence of D. R. Brimhall, to develop and supervise research supported by
the Civil Aeronautics Administration.
The program was soon extended to include research on the selection
and training of pilots for the U.S. Navy. With the onset of World War
II, this was expanded to include research on many aspects of human per-
formance during Bight, supported by and conducted in cooperation with
the military services. The broadened scope of the program was acknowl-
edged, later in the 1940's, by changing the name of the committee to NRC
Committee on Aviation Psychology.
On February 1, 1942, when J. G. Jenkins, who was its chairman from
the start, joined the Medical Aviation Section of the U.S. Navy, I became
chairman of the committee and directed its program until the committee
was disbanded in 1951. As chairman of the committee I became involved
in the design of many experiments and in the administration of research on
perception, learning, and emotional disturbance, as well as on selection,
training, fatigue, air-sickness, accident prevention, and so forth, conducted
by investigators working at university and military centers throughout the
country. I also assumed the responsibility for editing and seeing to the pub-
lication of reports which numbered approximately 125 before the work of
438 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

the committee was completed. Much of the early work is described in the
five-year report published in 1945 (see 1945), but, unfortunately, most of
the research reports have not found their way into the open literature.
Of course, much of the burden of such responsibilities was carried by
staff members, including J. W. Dunlap who acted as research director for
a period of time, and by a number of highly competent staff assistants,
particularly H. S. Odbert, A. S. Thompson, E. S. Ewart, and R. Y. Walker.
In addition-and of utmost importance-was the constant help of an Execu-
tive Subcommittee which included not only psychologists, but representa-
tives from many disciplines, e.g., physiology, medicine, and engineering,
and also members of the military forces. D. R. Brimhall, L. Carmichael, and
W. R. Miles are only a few among the many of the highly competent and
devoted psychologists who gave freely of their time and of their skills, as
members of this subcommittee, in planning and evaluating research proj-
ects. I also enjoyed and profited from associations with many others, such
as J. P. Guilford, H. 1\1. Johnson, E. L. Kelly, C. Landis, F. A. Geldard, N. L.
Munn, K. W. Spence, and G. R. Wendt, who served as investigators on such
projects. In addition, I have derived great satisfaction from my work and
continuing associations with the quite large number of younger men, in-
cluding many who have since made important contributions and achieved
reputations as psychologists, who started their research careers as staff mem-
bers on such projects.
During the entire decade of the 1940's, a considerable portion of both
my time and energy was devoted to the Committee on Aviation Psychology.
Much of the remaining portion was also devoted to the war effort, through
work with the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and as a consultant
to various branches of the military services.
Entry into the NDRC program came almost casually, in the fall of
1941, when Gaylord P. Harnwell-then chairman of the Department of
Physics and now president of the University of Pennsylvania-asked me to
become a member of a committee on the Selection and Training of U nder-
water Sound Operators, Division 6.1, NDRC, of which he was chairman.
My major work in this connection, which continued until shortly after
V-J day, involved the development and original validation of a battery of
tests and the preparation of test manuals which were used during most of
the war in the selection of underwater (sonar) operators.
My other activities with NDRC included membership-along with
W. S. Hunter, C. H. Graham, L. Carmichael, C. W. Bray, G. K. Bennett,
and others-on the Applied Psychology Panel, which had the responsibility
for supervising nation-wide research and action programs on many aspects
of military performance. I also served as a consultant to a number of NDRC
divisions. Most particularly, I was directly responsible for the administra-
tion of a series of projects, conducted for NDRC under contract between
MORRIS S. VITELES 439

the University of Pennsylvania and OSRD. These, carried on in naval in-

stallations between Norfolk and Newport, Rhode Island, on the East Coast,
between San Diego and Seattle on the West Coast, and at army centers
in between, included work on the selection, classification, and training of
antiaircraft gun crews; the formulation of doctrine and training of personnel
operating main batteries aboard naval vessels; training of engineering divi-
sion personnel; the development of improved procedures for the assignment
of personnel to billets on naval vessels ranging from destroyer escorts through
small aircraft carriers to battleships, and so forth.
The mission of the NDRC University of Pennsylvania projects was
largely programmatic, in the sense of finding ways of applying to the mili-
tary situation such psychological principles and procedures as could be im-
mediately useful in dealing with personnel problems faced by the military
services, and resulted in the preparation of a large number of procedural
manuals. However, there were provisions for research on pertinent prob-
lems, and outcomes from research conducted by the staff were far from
negligible. Of particular interest among these are the findings of a study,
conducted in collaboration with D. D. Wickens, A. B. Bayroff, 1\1. H.
Rogers, H. A. Voss, and others, designed to examine the transfer effects to
performance in range estimation from instruction on a synthetic range esti-
mation trainer which, in accordance with current practice at the time, had
been widely distributed for use without prior evaluation. This experiment,
which showed negligible transfer from the synthetic device to performance
on the firing line, and that short periods of systematic training on the firing
line produced both significant improvements in range estimation and a re-
duction in the variability of performance, proved to be of value not alone
in connection with the training of antiaircraft gunners, but also in leading
toward later large-scale evaluation of proposed synthetic training devices
as a necessary condition to their adoption.
As I think about the multiplicity of the activities involved in work
with the NDRC, I sometimes wonder how I was able to do what was re-
quired along with the work involved with the NRC Committee on Avia-
tion Psychology. Familiarization with the problems involved called for fir-
ing line practice; trial runs on simulated bombing and fighter flights in
naval aircraft; participation in precommissioning and shakedown cruises in
American waters; observing and participating in antisubmarine warfare
exercises in Bermuda waters, as well as many other varied contracts and
activities. Frequent trips were required to these various stations in planning
and coordinating the activities of the project. However, relief in the way of
partial leave from the University and an adjustment of my work schedule
in industry helped sufficiently to ease the situation for me to come through
the hectic period without any signs of having suffered physically or other-
wise from the demands of the situation.
Most of the NDRC projects in which I was engaged came to an end
440 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

in 1946. Research administered by the Committee on Aviation Psychology

continued for a few more years, and it was not until 1951 that all of the
research reports were completed and the committee was dissolved. How-
ever, in that year, at the urgent request of the Air Force, I made a nation-
wide survey with the objective of determining what could be done to im-
plement research that had already been completed and to outline what was
needed in the way of new research to deal with severe personnel problems
in the early warning centers and other installations maintained by the Air
Defense Command. With this mission accomplished, I closed out my work
with the military and since 1951 have been involved to only a slight extent
with military projects.
As I look back upon my work in the military situation, I experience a
feeling of deep satisfaction in having had an opportunity to participate in
and, hopefully, make a contribution to the war effort. I found pleasure and
profit, too, in working closely with the military people who were almost uni-
formly unstinting in their efforts to facilitate the work under way, and
established friendships with many of them-such as Captain W. E. Kellum,
Group Captain Percy A. Lee-which continue until today. From the view-
point of this autobiographical chapter, there is need however to consider the
question of what I learned and how my career as a teacher and as an indus-
trial psychologist was irilluenced by more than a decade of intensive work
on military projects. I see the following as major effects.
There was much profit to me in the way of intellectual stimulation
and enrichment. By 1940, the Department of Psychology at the University
of Pennsylvania had lost its strength and its glamor, at least at the level
of the senior staff. There were a few exciting young people around-espe-
cially Francis W. Irwin and Malcolm C. Preston-and an exchange of ideas
with them was and continues to be a stimulating experience. However, a
most rewarding outcome of my work was what I gained in the way of a
broader background in psychology and of greater experimental sophistica-
tion through my associations with psychologists representing diverse areas
of psychological research and practice.
I also learned much about the problems encountered in administrative
work and how to deal with them. Nevertheless, I had never been inter-
ested in administrative work as a career, and my experience in administer-
ing military research intensified my desire to devote myself to teaching,
research, and professional practice, rather than become a professional ad-
ministrator. This conviction was intensified by what I observed in the way
of changes that occurred in a number of promising young psychologists
who turned into administrators-who turned from the manipulation of ideas
to the manipulation of money, men, and organizations.
As shown in my publications, I have always taken a strong stand on
the importance of a close identification between experimental and applied
psychology. I am convinced that the fact that experimental and other psy-
MORRIS S. VITELES 441

chologists worked closely together during the war contributed to mutual

understanding and tolerance. Many applied psychologists learned something
about the need for sound experimental designs and a theoretical background
for research; many experimental psychologists learned that they could do
research which had practical objectives without losing their identity as ex-
perimen talists.
This does not mean that the schism has completely disappeared, al-
though I am not particularly disturbed about it. I am highly pleased, for ex-
ample, at the amount of miltary funds that is going into basic research.
Nevertheless, at times I sense a neglect of the implications of such research
for dealing with problems which need to be solved in the public inter-
est and tend to recall a suggestion, included in my report at the comple-
tion of my work with the Air Force in 1951, which made me very un-
popular with many psychologists engaged in research for the Air Force, to
the effect that those engaged in research be placed in military installations
for a period of six months to do what could properly be done in implement-
ing already available research findings. Of course, I did not seriously expect
that this suggestion would be followed in toto, but I was glad to find that
something was accomplished in providing for the greater utilization of re-
search findings in dealing with the many and serious problems encountered
in Air Defense Command installations.
Reference to the influence of the war upon psychology and psychologists
would not be complete without mentioning another significant development
that became prominent in the 1940's. I refer here to the expansion of what is
now commonly called "human engineering" which is concerned, primarily,
with the psychological aspects of the design and operation of man-machine
systems. I neither found myself attracted to nor became active in this field.
Nevertheless, it seems necessary to call attention, in passing, to the stream
of developments in an area of research and practice that has considerable
significance to industrial as well as to military psychology and also in terms
of rapprochement between "experimental" and "applied" psychology.

THE RETURN TO "NORMALCY" (1951-1963)

As noted earlier, my work on military projects virtually came to an

end in 1951. However, even before that time, I had started the return to
"normalcy." For example, in 1946 I spent approximately two months in
Germany on behalf of the Technical Industrial Intelligence Division, De-
partment of Commerce. This was the only time throughout the war period
that I was clothed in military garb and reported through military channels
(Field Information Agency Technical, Office of Military Government of
Germany U.S. Army), although, paradoxically, I was mostly engaged in ex-
442 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

amining wartime developments in industrial psychology and in industrial

relations. In fact, the chief outcome of this trip was a report on significant
developments in the selection and training of supervisory personnel in
German industry. There were, however, opportunities for many other in-
teresting observations in my field, and I also learned, in passing, that caste
had not disappeared in the American army, when a colonel was forced out
of his room at the Hotel Schloss in Heidelberg in spite of my protesta-
tions, because as a civilian carrying a simulated higher military rank, I was
entitled to the room which had been assigned to him.
During the late 1940's, I also traveled to Europe to attend two inter-
esting meetings of psychologists, the International Congress of Psychology
in Edinburgh in 1948, and that of the International Psychotechnical As-
sociation (International Association of Applied Psychology) in Berne in
1949. Although there were military involvements in both trips, attendance
at the meetings provided an opportunity to learn what was going on in the
field of industrial psychology during these postwar years and also to renew
associations with professional colleagues and friends in the field.
During the late 1940's, I also found time to turn to the revision of
my book Industrial Psychology. I succeeded in updating a goodly portion
of the book to about 1945, and began to bring such sections up to about
1950, and also to work on chapters untouched since about 1940. Among
the first of the latter to which I turned my attention, because of a growing
interest in problems of employee motivation (see 1947), was the chapter
entitled "Motives in Industry." Under this caption I had been able, in
1932, to cover essentially all of the significant research which had been
done on employee motivation both in the United States and abroad up to
that time. It soon became evident that a book was needed to cover ade-
quately what had been done in this field. I therefore dropped the revision
of Industrial Psychology and turned to the preparation of a volume that
was published in 1953 under the title of Motivation and Morale in Industry.
The theme and content of this book reflect, in part, the concern of
industry with the problem of motivating employees which grew in magni-
tude after World War II. The theme and content of Motivation and Morale
in Industry reflect also a highly significant change in the orientation of
industrial psychology-in the form of increasing interest in motives, inter-
personal behavior, small group influences, and the general social context of
behavior-which came clearly into focus in approximately the mid-1940's.
Supporting this change was the growth of an experimental social psychol-
ogy which, along with other social sciences, provided the theories, the re-
search techniques, and a set of values that have grossly affected psychological
research and practice in industry, as well as in other fields, in the past
quarter of a century.
Although already evident in the general field of psychology as early
as the mid-I 920' s, this did not become a strong force in industrial psychol-
MORRIS S. VITELES 443

ogy until the 1940's. It is not possible to deal with the people and the
forces within and outside of psychology that produced the strong emphasis
in industrial psychology upon the operation of social groups, but I think of
Whiting Williams, A. W. Kornhauser, E. Mayo, F. Linton, T. M. White-
head, K. Lewin, G. Friedmann, and, in the specific area of motivational
theory, A. H. Maslow, as having had a particularly strong influence on my
thinking.
It may be true, as has been suggested by a number of my associates
and also more distant colleagues, that the publication of Motivation and
Morale in Industry in 1953 reflects a transformation in my own role from
that of a personnel psychologist to that of a social psychologist. If such a
transition did take place, it occurred painlessly and without overt recogni-
tion on my part. Actually, I see the preparation of Motivation and Morale in
Industry as an expression of a preoccupation with the problems of motiva-
tion and with the role of supervisory personnel and of the group in industry
that is already strongly apparent in Industrial Psychology (1932). In fact,
others have noted the degree to which recent concern with problems of
motivation, management, and organization is anticipated early in this text
(Katz, 1949). In this connection, too, I am intrigued by the extent to which
the concept of a "systems approach" in management and organizational psy-
chology, stressed by Stagner in a recent review of books in these areas (Stag-
ner, 1966), coincides with what I (under the influence of Witmer) call the
"clinical approach" in industry, and with my views on the intluence of gestalt
psychology, as expressed in an article (see 193Oc) published in 1930.
Be this as it may, during approximately the past twenty years, I have
become increasingly preoccupied with employee attitudes and employee moti-
vation (1947, 1955a); with the study of organization (1955b, 1962a); with
the problems of management behavior (1954) and management selection
and development (1958); and with similar issues in which the inlluence of
social psychology is most apparent. In addition, my attention has turned more
and more to a number of other social issues, to some extent peripheral to the
field of industrial psychology. Among these is a quite deep interest in the
interaction between science and the humanities and in the role of humanistic
education in a developing industrial civilization.
Opportunities for giving expression to such interests referred to above
have been enlarged through my associations since 1951 with the Bell Tele-
phone Company of Pennsylvania. To some extent accidental factors played
a part in the initiation of my relationship with this company. Late in 1950,
I gave an address on the "Problem of Boredom" (1952) which came to the
attention of \\1. D. Gillen, president of the company, who was concerned
with what appeared to be a high incidence of severe boredom among em-
ployees working on routine clerical tasks. In 1951, in the midst of one of
the busiest years of my life, I agreed to devote a total of ten days during
the year to an exploration of this problem.
444 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Examination of the situation indeed suggested that something could

be done about this through job enlargement and a number of other rela-
tively simple steps. However, it also quickly became apparent that much
more was involved, especially in terms of the constitution of the small
groups and of the relationships, on the one hand, between the workers
and their supervisors and, on the other, between supervisors and their su-
periors. I found it of interest to extend my study of these aspects of the
situations and to other problems which were brought to my attention. As
a result, I continued as a consultant with the Bell Telephone Company of
Pennsylvania, and have enjoyed fifteen years of stimulating associations,
especially with John Markle II, Vice President, Personnel, who himself has
contributed much to the development and implementation of the programs
with which I have been concerned.
One of the outcomes of my work with this company which gave me
particular satisfaction is an extensive project, known as the Management
Coordination Program, which was designed to bring fuller and more effec-
tive participation, particularly at lower levels of management, in arriving
at decisions affecting both supervisory personnel and employees (see 1954).
I have been involved in consultation and research on other problems, chiefly
in the area of management development. Among all of these activities, I
have been most interested in my involvement in the development and evalu-
ation of a unique program of humanistic education for executives which
was carried on at the University of Pennsylvania, for managerial personnel
from the entire Bell System, during the years 1953-1960 inclusive. Espe-
cially gratifying was the demonstration, in an evaluation study, that a pro-
gram of this kind-involving a full year of exposure to philosophy, literature,
art, history, and social studies-did indeed bring the flight from "over-con-
formity," the liberalization of opinions, the changes in interest, and the
modifications of value systems which were sought in the initiation of the
program (see 1959).
My satisfaction with the outcomes of the program of humanistic edu-
cation for executives reflects an interest in the humanities and in the full
realization of the potentials of "humanistic" teaching with which 1 have
been concerned throughout my years. In my teaching, where I frequently
draw upon literature and the arts, especially in lecturing to undergraduates,
I still find no better way, for example, of introducing a discussion of the
nurture-nature controversy than by reference to Aldous Huxley's Brave
New World, George Orwell's 1984, or even by merely quoting, from W. S.
Gilbert, the wondrous soliloquy which notes that "Every little boy or girl,
that's born into this world alive, is either a little liberal or else a conserva-
tive." (Perhaps I overdo Gilbert and Sullivan. At least, my good friend
Malcolm Preston found it necessary to place on the bulletin board a notice
stating where the music to Viteles' Industrial Psychology could be pur-
chased, when this book was published in 1932.) I find it difficult to dis-
MORRIS S. VITELES 445

cuss the psychological effects of a mechanized industrial civilization without

reference to Samuel Butler's Erewhon, to Romain Rolland's Revolt of the
Machines, and so on. There may be exaggeration in the statement, in a
discussion of advertising strategy and of theories of motivation, that "pos-
sibly we are saved from the solemnities of Freud by the sanity of Rabelais"
(Anon., 1956, p. 4). Nevertheless, especially in the present state of psycho-
analytical theory, it would seem that understanding might be enhanced
by asking students to read l\1ereschowski's Leonardo da Vinci, and also the
biography by Antonina Vallentin, along with Freud's own treatment of
Leonardo.
In emphasizing teaching that helps to establish the bonds between
the science of psychology and the humanities, I am concerned not alone with
arriving at a fuller view of the nature of human behavior, but also with
problems in the areas of value judgments. I find myself increasingly ques-
tioning the assumption, so frequently made by scientists, that they are better
capable of assessing the value of a variety of life events than are the play-
wright, the artist, the historian, and other creative people or scholars in the
area of the humanities. More and more I find myself recalling the forceful
appeal made by A. V. Hill that "scientists should be implored to remember
that, however accurate their scientific facts, their moral judgments may
be wrong" (Hill, 1951, p. 371).
This exhortation takes on particular importance to me because of a
current tendency on the part of psychologists-especially the social psychol-
ogists-to report research findings in a manner which makes it increasingly
difficult, especially for the layman, to determine when they are dealing with
conclusions or principles derived from experiments, or when they are merely
presenting their own value judgments. To say this is not to deny the right
of the psychologist to his opinions-to his own value judgments. It is not
his privilege, however, to clothe the frequently questionable sources and
personal nature of such opinions in the language or form of scholarly speech
or writing to the point where it would appear that they are the outcomes
of scientific inquiries.

THE PAST FEW YEARS (1963-1965)

My increasing concern with such matters has been dealt with in a

paper entitled "The New Utopia" (l955c) and in an unpublished paper
entitled "Humanistic Teaching: Opportunity and Dilemma." The latter re-
flects also my continuing interest in teaching, which has become an increas-
ingly absorbing activity during the last decade, in large part because of a
vibrant intellectual climate that exists since the reorganization of the De-
partment of Psychology and of its goals, with the appointment of R. R. Bush
as chairman, in 1957, and the addition of a group of highly stimulating
 446 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

younger psychologists, such as R. D. Luce, R. L. Solomon, P. Teitelbaum,

and H. Gleitman, the current chairman, to the staff. In my "declining years"
I still find time for research, but, more and more, whatever spare time I
can find from teaching and administrative duties at the University is de-
voted to writing.
The revision of Industrial Psychology is proceeding more rapidly than
in past years. I have long been interested in the effects of technological
change upon employment and career adjustment (l933b, 1934, 1935, 1936b)
and now find myself increasingly concerned with the immediate and long-
range effects of accelerated mechanization and automation ( 1962b) and
have undertaken to present its problems-for people and for society-in a
book to be entitled l\lan, l\lind, and Alachines, which is approximately half-
way to completion. Nevertheless, I still find I have difficulty in devoting
as much time as I should like to spend on writing because of involvements
in administrative work, undertaken in the later years of my life in spite of
the fact that I always have found much more pleasure and satisfaction in
teaching, research, and writing than in administration.
There has been, nevertheless, considerable satisfaction for me in one
of these administrative activities-that of serving as president of the Inter-
national Association of Applied Psychology since 1958. In general, through
the years I have had no ambitions with respect to holding office in profes-
sional organizations, although at various times I have done so. However, I
have thoroughly enjoyed my work with the I.A.A.P. and have found great
pleasure in the opportunities which the office has provided for closer asso-
ciation with R. Bonnardel, C. B. Frisby, J. Germain, L. Canestrelli, G. Wes-
terlund, and other colleagues and friends from many countries. I find ad-
ditional and great satisfaction in what I believe has been a successful effort
to enhance the value of the association, not alone as an agency for the ex-
change of scientific information, but as a medium for the promotion of the
closer understanding and the mutual respect among scientists throughout
the world that can have a significant impact in the area of improved inter-
national relations.
A much more extended and greater responsibility in the way of ad-
ministrative responsibility came when I agreed to serve as acting-Dean of
the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania for the
academic year 1963-64 and then to continue as dean when it became ap-
parent that more time was needed to find a younger scholar, free from the
taint of professional "educationalism" to serve as dean. It is not possible to
deal with the circumstances that led me to do so, in spite of my adverse
attitude toward administration, except to say that there was great need to
make a start on the rehabilitation of this school, and I felt lowed this
service to the University. Perhaps I am deluding myself in the belief that
I was also moved by the challenge of making sure that the changes which
were undertaken in the way of adding scholars to the staff, in the way of
MORRIS S. VITELES 447

raising admission standards, and in the way of developing a program oriented

toward excellence in scholarship would be continued after my departure.
Be this as it may, I am now a dean-a member of the always vulner-
able administrative cadre of a university. However, I continue to teach and
to do research and look forward, hopefully, to a period of extended writing,
along with a modicum of consulting work, following my retirement from
the University in 1968 at age seventy, and after fifty years of service.

REFERENCES

Selected Publications by Morris S. Viteles

Tests in industry. ]. appl. Psychol., 1921, 5, 57-63.
A comparison of three tests of general intelligence. ]. appl. Psychol., 1922, 6,
392-401. (a)
Job specifications and diagnostic tests of job competency designed for the Auditing
Division of a street railway company. Psychol. Ciin., 1922, 14, 83-105. (b)
Instruction in psychology in Paris. Psychol. Bull., 1923, 20, 545-552. (a)
Psychology in business-in England, France, and Germany. Ann. Amer. Acad.
pol. soc. Sci., 1923, 110, 209-220. (b)
Research in the selection of motormen, Part I. ]. pers. Res., 1925, 3, lID-lIS;
Part II, J. pers. Res., 1925, 4, 173-197.
Psychology in industry. Psychol. Bull., 1926,23,631-680.
Psychology in industry. Psychol. Bull., 1928, 25, 6, 309-340.
Psychology and psychiatry in industry: the viewpoint of a psychologist. Ment.
Hyg., 1929, 13, 361-377.
The human factor in substation operation: specifications and tests for substation
operators. Personnel j., 1930, 11, 21-27. (a)
Psychology in industry. Psychol. Bull., 1930,27, 567-635. (b)
Die gestalt-betrachsungsweise in der angewandte psychologie, Z. F. Ang. Psych.,
1930, 35, 525-531. (c)
Industrial psychology. New York: Norton, 1932.
Adjustment in industry through training. Personnel ]., 1933, 11, 295-306. (a)
Training and unemployment. The Human Factor, 1933, 7, 307-311. (b)
The science of work. New York: Norton, 1934.
Psychology and reemployment. Scientifzc Monthly, 1934, 39, 271-273.
Le point de vue psychologique du chomage aux Etats-Unis. Le Travail humain,
1935, 3, 129-138.
A dynamic criterion. Occupations, 1936 (Section 1), 14, 1-5. (a)
How technological changes affect employees. Mech. Engng., 1936, 58, 302-303.
(b)
Industrial psychology in Russia. Gccu». Psychol., 1938, Spring issue, 1-19. (a)
The application of psychology in industrial relations. A.M.A. Personnel Ser.,
1938, 35, 23-26. (b)
(with F. J. Keller) Vocational guidance throughout the world. New York: Norton,
1938.
Caveat emptor. ]. consult. Psychol., 1941, 5, 118-122. (a)
 448 A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The role of industrial psychology in defending the future of America. Ann. Amer.
Acad. pol. soc. Sci., 1941 (July), 156-162. (b)
The aircraft pilot: five years of research: a summary of outcomes. Psychol. Bull.,
1945, 42, 489-526.
The role of leadership in supervisory management: human problems in business
and industry. New Wilmington, Penn.: The Economic and Business Founda-
tion, 1945.
(with K. R. Smith) An experimental investigation of the effect of changes in
atmospheric conditions and noise upon performance. Trans. Amer. Soc. Heat-
ing and Ventilating Engr., 1946, 52, 167-180.
The measurement of employee attitudes. In C. W. Churchman, R. L. Ackoff,
& M. Wax (Eds.), Measurement of consumer interest. Philadelphia: Univ.
of Pennsylvania Press, 1947, 177-197.
L'homme et la machine: le probleme de l'ennui. Le Travail humain, 1952, 15,
85-100.
Motivation and morale in industry. New York: Norton, 1953.
What raises a man's morale? Personnel, 1954, 30, 302-313.
Motivation and morale-whose responsibility? Personnel Practice Bull. (Aus-
tralia), 1955, 11, 27-42. (a)
The human factor in organization. University of Minnesota Industrial Relations
Research and Technical Report 17, 1955, 19-26. (b)
The new Utopia. Science, 1955, 122, 1167-1171. (c)
L'Identification du potentiel du personnel d'encadrement. Bull. de l'association
internationale de psychologie appliquee, 1958, 7, 44-79.
"Human relations" and the "humanities" in the education of business leaders:
evaluation of a program of humanistic studies for executives. Personnel Psychol.,
1959, 12, 1-28.
Fundamentalism in industrial psychology. Occup. Psychol., 1959, 33, 98-110.
(with A. H. Brayfield & L. E. Tyler) Vocational counseling: a reappraisal in
honor of Donald G. Paterson, Minnesota Studies in Student Personnel Worh
No. 11, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1961.
Personality and organization: the indivdual and the system: an introduction. In
G. Nielsen (Ed.), Industrial and business psychology. Munksgaard, 1962, 97-
100. (a)
Man, mind, and machines. In G. Nielsen (Ed.), Industrial and business psy-
chology. Munksgaard, 1962, 9-25. (b)

Other Publications Cited

Anonymous. Advertising strategy and theories of motivation. Cost and Profot

Outlook, 1956,9, (12),4.
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